Oct 232019
 
 October 23, 2019  Posted by at 12:31 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Salvador Dali Self portrait 1921

 

On October 21 2019, Brexit became an entirely irrelevant issue. Or perhaps we should say it had already become that, but on that date it was exposed for all to see that it was. The parading into a courtroom of Julian Assange in London was all the evidence one could need that the UK government breaks its own laws as well as numerous international laws, with impunity. But that is not how the media reported on it, if it did at all.

And so, the core issue behind Brexit, i.e. who makes Britain’s laws, turned to nothing. If your government breaks its own laws all the time, what does it matter where those laws are made? They are meaningless anyway. Whether they come from Brussels or London make no difference if the government and judicial system don’t abide by them. Those million men marches for a Final Say look totally ridiculous once that reality sinks in.

I can’t get the picture of Julian Assange as he looked on Monday out of my head. I’ve written so much about him, tried so hard to find support for him, and now to see him withered away and perhaps not strong enough to see the end of his own extradition hearing is heartbreaking. So let’s go through the whole thing again; it’s not like I could write about anything else right now. I was thinking again yesterday about a song I used in an earlier article about Julian, I Fought the Law.

 

 

That is how the vast majority of people will see his case, that he fought the law and the law caught up with him. But that’s not at all what’s been happening. He doesn’t fight the law, he fights the lawless posing as the law. The only person who’s abided by the law the entire time this epic tragedy has now lasted has been Julian Assange (and his lawyers, and others who work with him, and former Ecuador president Correa). All the other players, the people who’ve been chasing, torturing and now murdering him have all broken the law consistently, one after the other, and in coordinated fashion. But they have the media on their side, and that’s how the story got turned upside down. Propaganda wins.

In 2010, Swedish police invented a rape allegation out of thin air and against the expressed wishes of the alleged victim. There’s the Swedish prosecutor who overruled his own peer who had ruled that the rape allegation was annulled and Assange was free to go the UK. Then the British prosecutor who released Assange on bail citing that fake Swedish allegation and then called him in without either country wanting to guarantee extradition to the US was off, subsequently keeping him locked in the Ecuador embassy for 7 years because of that same fake allegation without allowing him to travel to the country he’d been granted asylum in.

This was followed (after 7 years!) by the new Ecuador government that violated any and all international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum, but only after hiring a Spanish “security” company that recorded all of his -and all of his visitors’ – talks and phones etc., including client-lawyer and doctor-patient conversations that we all know are confidential -and for good reason- and up to and including Julian’s talks with his psychologist and swipes of everyone’s DNA, including his children. They even (live-) streamed all this confidential information to the CIA.

Next, the UK police arrested him inside another country’s embassy. And now he’s in a super high security prison for no apparent reason at all, after a judge (where do they find these judges in the UK, so eager to break their own laws?) said he was a risk to “abscond”. Even if that were true, how is that a reason for worse treatment than an A-level crazy terrorist, inflicted upon someone who’s never harmed a fly? And then Monday in court, a British court, it was a bunch of Americans who openly decided what should happen, as per Craig Murray who was there, and both the prosecutor and the judge complied.

 

What Assange practiced when he published “US war files” is called journalism. Which thank god is perfectly legal. Much of what those files reveal is not. What he did when he allegedly “skipped bail” in the UK is called requesting asylum. Also perfectly legal, a basic human right. He never broke a law. And that of course is why the Espionage Act was dusted off and applied to his case in a proverbial round peg/square hole fashion: they couldn’t find anything else to charge him with. And after so many laws have already been broken, what difference does one more make?

If you live in Britain and you think Brexit is a more important issue than Assange, you’re delusional. Nothing is more important to anyone in a society than a government torturing a man to death in broad daylight, a man who moreover has not broken a single law. We don’t even torture mass murderers, terrorists or child rapists to death anymore, at least not at home. But Julian Assange IS treated that way. And whether the UK will be a part of Europe or not, that is the country it has become. A lawless medieval banana republic.

 

 


 

 

 

 

Aug 192019
 


Piet Mondriaan Self portrait 1918

 

Guardian columnist Owen Jones, a self-described left activist and socialist, was attacked in the streets of London at 2 am Saturday morning in what he himself describes as “a blatant premeditated assault” by a bunch of guys. He says he was kicked, punched, but then saved by the friends he was with, and nothing really happened to him. Or he would have taken photos and published them. Owen was fine, before and after. But his pride was not.

No pictures of black eyes or anything, but a brick load of indignation. No matter that in Britain, people are attacked all the time, certainly at that hour, in bar fights, in knife fights, people die every weekend. But for some reason Owen Jones thinks his role in this is special. That the incident happened because of his political views, and because the far right is getting more aggressive.

From Jones’s own Guardian:

 

Owen Jones Attacked Outside London Pub

The Guardian columnist and activist Owen Jones has been physically assaulted in London while celebrating his 35th birthday with friends. In an attack he called “a blatant premeditated assault”, Jones said he was kicked, punched and thrown to the ground by a group of men in the early hours of Saturday morning. He said that he and his friends went to a pub and left at 3am.

“We were about 30 metres away, saying goodbye to each other, when four men charged directly towards me: one of them karate kicked my back, threw me to the ground, started kicking me in the head and back, while my friends tried to drag them off, and were punched trying to defend me. “It was clearly a premeditated attack and I was their target. They all attacked me and only assaulted my friends when they tried to defend me.

“In the past year I’ve been repeatedly targeted in the street by far right activists, including attempts to use physical assault, and homophobic abuse. I’ve had a far-right activist taking pictures of me, and posting threatening messages and a video. “Because of this, and escalating threats of violence and death, I’ve had the police involved. My friends felt it was a matter of time until this happened. Give the context, it seems unthinkable that I was singled out for anything other than a politically motived premeditated attack.”

 

A second article in the same Guardian appeared on Sunday:

 

Owen Jones: Attackers Targeted Me For My Politics

Jones said: “I’m just a symptom of a wider phenomenon, an emboldened, increasingly violent far right.” He said he believed there had been a “dramatic escalation” in the level of threat faced by him and others in the last eight or nine months. He said far-right protesters were being radicalised by what he described as “hate preachers” in politics and in some parts of the media.

“We all know who the hate preachers are: one of them is the most powerful man on earth, the occupant of the White House. But there are also multiple politicians and people in the mainstream media who deliberately stoke tensions, who demonise minorities and who demonise the left,” he said.

[..] “The far right are trying to achieve political ends through coercion and violence, so there’s no way I’m going to change. Yes, I’ll take precautions, but I’ll be at my protests, fighting against racism, for socialism. What could I have done? Not had a birthday thing? Of course everybody should be vigilant, but I’m not going to be intimidated. I’m not changing my politics.”

 

I’m not sure (but of course I wasn’t there and I’m not in Jones’s shoes), but given the time of day, his ‘celebrity’ status and the fact that he’s openly gay, I could imagine this was not about politics. Not that that’s the crucial point in this, which is that everybody should be able to have a birthday party and be left in peace.

I must admit I smiled when I read that Jones said his attackers “charged out of the pub with military precision”, and then ostensibly failed to hurt him even a little bit. That sounds like either the most inept right wing militant unit ever, or they were all just piss drunk.

Still, calling Trump a hate preacher is also demonizing, and I do wonder why Jones feels that is appropriate while other comments are not. The Proud Boys vs Antifa ‘party’ this weekend in Portland, Oregon would seem to establish this, at least in the US, as a two-way street, but I’m not even going to try to convince both sides that there may be some blame in their camp too.

Because I think the following is much more important in the Owen Jones story. A few lines from the first article referenced above say:

 

Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian and Observer, said: “We deplore the outrageous attack on Owen Jones that took place late last night. Violent assaults on journalists or activists have no place in a democratic society.”


Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn sent a message of “solidarity” to Jones. He said: “Owen believes it was politically motivated, and we know the far right is on the march in our country. “An attack on a journalist is an attack on free speech and our fundamental values.”

 

Look, neither Katharine Viner, nor Owen Jones, nor the Guardian as a company, nor Jeremy Corbyn, have any right whatsoever, none, zilch, to present themselves as defenders of journalism or journalists. The reason for that is dead simple, and it consists of only two words: Julian Assange.

Jeremy Corbyn sits in the British parliament, while Assange sits in a high-security prison designed for terrorists, and those two things should never happen at the same time, lest Corbyn loses the right to speak. Hereby lost. And pretending to be a defender of journalism while a man who has won dozens of international awards for … journalism, rots away a few miles from that same Parliament, is too ridiculous to even talk about.

Owen Jones writes for the Guardian, and knows exactly what his employer has done to Julian Assange. And he can whine about an ‘attack’ on him all he wants, but there’s a journalist who’s really under attack, life-changing, life-threatening, if not lethal, and I have never seen Jones speak up for him. So spare us the hollow talk about hate preachers. It’s your own employer and your own government who preach hate.

As for The Guardian, it has been engaged in a vile anti-Assange smear campaign for many years, perhaps culminating in, but by no means limited to, the article last November that claimed Trump’s one-time adviser Paul Manafort had visited Assange many times in the Ecuador embassy, which was thoroughly debunked but never withdrawn or corrected.

Publishing an article such as that while you know it to be a bag of lies, makes you unfit to talk about journalism, period, for the rest of your lives. Sure, many of your readers may believe in you, and in what you tell them, after you’ve fed them smear and falsehoods for so long. But even if they believe you, that still doesn’t make you a news organization, it makes you a propaganda outlet. It makes you a pitchblack stain on your profession.

 

Australian journalist Mark Davis worked with Assange and the Guardian on the publication of the Afghan war logs in 2010. He recently spoke out about those days. And added a nice little -legal- twist to the story.

 

Australian Investigative Journalist Exposes Guardian/New York Times Betrayal Of Assange

At a Sydney “Politics in the Pub” meeting on Thursday night, award-winning Australian journalist Mark Davis revealed new first-hand information exposing the extent of the betrayal of Julian Assange by the Guardian and the New York Times, and refuting the lies both publications have used to smear the WikiLeaks founder.

Davis recounted his experiences documenting Assange’s life in the first half of 2010 for programs screened on the Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). Using excerpts from the documentary “Inside WikiLeaks,” the journalist explained that he was present when WikiLeaks worked closely with media partners, including the Guardian and the New York Times, in the publication of the Afghan War logs.

[..] Davis said the assertions by Guardian journalists that Assange exhibited a callous attitude towards US informants and others who may have been harmed by the publication of the document were “lies.” David Leigh and Nick Davies, senior Guardian journalists, who worked closely with Assange in the publication of the logs, have repeatedly claimed that Assange was indifferent to the consequences of the publication.

Their statements have played a key role in the attempts by the corporate media to smear Assange, and dovetail with US government claims that the 2010 publications “aided the enemy.” In reality, the US and Australian militaries have been compelled to admit that release of the Afghan war logs did not result in a single individual coming to physical harm.

Davis explained that he was present in “the bunker,” a room established by the Guardian to prepare the publication of the documents. “Nick Davies made the most recurring, repetitive statement that Julian had a cavalier attitude to life. It’s a complete lie. If there was any cavalier attitude, it was the Guardian journalists. They had disdain for the impact of this material.”

[..] Davis explained that despite the vast technical resources of the Guardian and the New York Times (NYT), it was left to Assange to personally redact the names of informants and other individuals from the war logs, less than three days before scheduled publication. Davis said Assange was compelled to work through an entire night, during which he removed some 10,000 names from the documents.

“Julian wanted to take the names out,” Davis said. “He asked for the releases to be delayed.” The request was rejected by the Guardian, “so Julian was left with the task of cleansing the documents. Julian removed 10,000 names by himself, not the Guardian.”

Davis refuted the attempts by the Guardian and the Times to downplay their central role in the publication of the leaks. He stated that the relationship between the corporate reporters and Assange was not that between journalists and their source. Rather, both outlets were intimately involved in preparing the publication of the documents.

This included, Davis said, the Guardian assigning a technical division to prepare the entire set of logs in a publishable and searchable format on the WikiLeaks website. Davis explained that even in 2010, the Guardian and the NYT had employed “subterfuge” to shield them from any legal repercussions over the publication. Despite the explosive contents of the leaks, they had both insisted that WikiLeaks should publish first.

This, Davis stated, would allow them to claim that they were not primary publishers of the material, but were merely reporting material that had been released by WikiLeaks. This was the equivalent of the publications “pushing Julian out to walk the plank,” he said. “Julian’s in jail now because of that subterfuge.”

Tellingly, Davis stated that this plan was disrupted as a result of technical issues on the WikiLeaks website. The Guardian and the Times nevertheless ran their scheduled stories, reporting on WikiLeaks’ supposed publication of the logs, despite the fact that they had not yet been placed on the WikiLeaks website.

WikiLeaks published the documents two days after they had been reported by the corporate publications. “WikiLeaks did not publish for two days,” Davis said. The Guardian and the Times had “reported a lie. They set Julian up from the start.”

Davis’s claim potentially has significant legal implications. The espionage charges, under which the Trump administration is seeking to extradite Assange to the US and prosecute him, include among their offenses WikiLeaks’ publication of the Afghan war logs.

Davis’ timeline, however, indicates that the Guardian and the New York Times were in fact the initial and primary publishers of the material. These publications, which are pillars of the media and political establishment, are “in the frame” for the supposed offenses that the Trump administration is seeking to prosecute Assange for. As Davis bluntly declared, “If Julian’s in jail, they should be as well.”

 

I’m sure the fact that this last article was published on the World Socialist Web Site will only add to the fun, if not credibility, of it, for self-described socialist Owen Jones.

But -more- seriously, you can’t let the most decorated journalist of your time wither away in a concrete box designed for Hannibal Lecter, and at the same time preach about some threat to journalism and the freedom of speech. Because if you do, you ARE that threat.

 

 

 

 

May 262019
 


 

Pence To West Point Grads: You Will Fight On a Battlefield for America (Taer)
Global Elites Started The Russia Nonsense (Farnan)
Indictment of Julian Assange is a Clear and Present Danger to Journalism (EFF)
The US Media Is in the Crosshairs of the New Assange Indictment (Lawfare)
The World: What is Really Happening (Murray)
Europeans Vote, With EU Future In Balance (R.)
Who Gets To Choose The UK’s Next Prime Minister? (BBC)
Elon Musk Confronts The “Bear Case” (VF)
You Will Probably Never Want To Eat GMO Food Again (Snyder)
Glyphosate Exposure Linked to Fatty Liver Disease in Humans (BP)

 

 

He’s ordering the body bags as we speak. And you thought Trump was crazy.

Pence To West Point Grads: You Will Fight On a Battlefield for America (Taer)

Vice President Mike Pence told the graduating class of the West Point Military Academy on Saturday that the world is “a dangerous place” and they should expect to see combat. “Men and women of West Point, no matter where you’re deployed, you will be the vanguard of freedom, and you know that the “soldier does not bear the sword in vain.” The work you do has never been more important. America will always seek peace, but peace comes through strength. And you are now that strength. It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen.


Some of you will join the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea continues to threaten the peace, and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region. Some of you will join the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere. And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win. The American people expect nothing less.”

Read more …

We’re going to hear a lot about this.

Global Elites Started The Russia Nonsense (Farnan)

Attorney General William Barr has turned the attention of the Russia probe to its origin: who started this and why? The answer, as in all the best crime dramas, is probably hiding in plain sight. On July 13, 2016, British academic Dr. Andrew Foxall penned an op-ed in the New York Times, “Why Putin Loves Brexit.” He blamed Russia for the previous month’s Brexit vote, adding in a little noted aside: The United States is so concerned over Moscow’s determination to exploit European disunity that in January, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, began a review of Russia’s clandestine funding of European parties. Bingo! The Obama administration was spying on conservative European political parties.

Which means, almost necessarily under the Five Eyes Agreement, foreign agents were returning the favor and spying on the Trump campaign. On August 11, 2018, I wrote: The British aristocracy has a condescending view of the hoi polloi who voted for Brexit, regarding them as easily manipulated Pygmalion-like by smarter people. They assumed Vladimir Putin was somehow playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who voted to reject the EU, because that’s how they see the world. Among the Cambridge class, this simple prejudice renders Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting evidence…. Without supporting evidence to prove their fantastical worldview, the global elite set out to manufacture some.

First up was Christopher Steele, who hasn’t set foot in Russia since 2009. He wears as a badge the claim that Putin hates him which, if true, means he has no real Russian sources. Maybe because of that, Steele’s farcical dossier on Trump was not enough for the FBI to open an investigation, and these international men of mystery needed something more. They invited George Papadopoulos to London, used a Maltese asset disguised as a Russian agent – Joseph Mifsud – to feed him a whopper about Hillary Clinton’s emails, then claimed he repeated the lie to Andrew Downer, an Australian diplomat with ties to the Clinton Foundation. That was the final straw that caused lovestruck counterintelligence specialist Peter Strzok to open an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign ..

[..] the FBI delegated the inspection of the computer servers to CrowdStrike, an insider paid by the DNC. James Comey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017 that CrowdStrike was “a highly respected private company.” What he failed to mention was that a month before his testimony, CrowdStrike had been caught falsely blaming Russia for a hack into a Ukrainian artillery computer app. In other words, at the same time this “highly respected private company” was blaming the Russians for stealing the Clinton campaign’s emails, it was fabricating a different Russian hack to serve Ukrainian misinformation.

Read more …

“The press stands in place of the public in holding the government accountable..”

This is the essence. And it’s not what the press has been doing. Other than WikiLeaks, that is.

Indictment of Julian Assange is a Clear and Present Danger to Journalism (EFF)

The century-old tradition that the Espionage Act not be used against journalistic activities has now been broken. Seventeen new charges were filed yesterday against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. These new charges make clear that he is being prosecuted for basic journalistic tasks, including being openly available to receive leaked information, expressing interest in publishing information regarding certain otherwise secret operations of government, and then disseminating newsworthy information to the public. The government has now dropped the charade that this prosecution is only about hacking or helping in hacking. Regardless of whether Assange himself is labeled a “journalist,” the indictment targets routine journalistic practices.

But the indictment is also a challenge to fundamental principles of freedom of speech. As the Supreme Court has explained, every person has the right to disseminate truthful information pertaining to matters of public interest, even if that information was obtained by someone else illegally. The indictment purports to evade this protection by repeatedly alleging that Assange simply “encouraged” his sources to provide information to him. This places a fundamental free speech right on uncertain and ambiguous footing. Make no mistake, this not just about Assange or Wikileaks—this is a threat to all journalism, and the public interest. The press stands in place of the public in holding the government accountable, and the Assange charges threaten that critical role.

The charges threaten reporters who communicate with and knowingly obtain information of public interest from sources and whistleblowers, or publish that information, by sending a clear signal that they can be charged with spying simply for doing their jobs.

Read more …

As if the US media doesn’t self-censor enough yet.

The US Media Is in the Crosshairs of the New Assange Indictment (Lawfare)

As Susan Hennessey said, “[I]t will be very difficult to craft an Espionage Act case against him that won’t adversely impact true journalists.” I don’t think this is an accident. I think the government’s indictment has the U.S. news media squarely in its sights. The first sentence of the indictment reads: “To obtain information to release on the WikiLeaks website, ASSANGE encouraged sources to (i) circumvent legal safeguards on information; (ii) provide that protected information to WikiLeaks for public dissemination; and (iii) continue the pattern of illegally procuring and providing protected information to WikiLeaks for distribution to the public.”

This is exactly what national security reporters and their news publications often ask government officials or contractors to do. Anytime a reporter asks to receive information knowing it is classified, that person encourages sources to circumvent legal safeguards on information. The news organizations’ encouragement is underscored by the mechanisms they provide for sources to convey information securely and anonymously. (The New York Times’s menu includes SecureDrop, an “encrypted submission system set up by The Times [that] uses the Tor anonymity software to protect [the] identity, location and the information” of the person who sends it.) Like WikiLeaks, these reporters and organizations encourage the sources to provide the “protected information” for public dissemination. And also like WikiLeaks, they often encourage the sources to engage in a “pattern of illegally procuring and providing protected information.”

There are other similarities. The government thought it significant that the WikiLeaks website states: “WikiLeaks accepts classified, censored, or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic, or ethical significance” (emphasis in indictment). This sounds very much like the public interest standard that U.S. editors use to decide when and how to publish classified information. Former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie once told me, “‘Highly classified’ doesn’t mean anything to me …. The question is, is it important for the American public to know that its government is acting in its name in this particular way?” Or as the Times’s former executive editor once said, “As journalists in a robust democracy, our responsibility is to publish information of interest to the public, and that includes publishing secrets when we find them.”

Read more …

“..the OPCW was manipulated by the NATO powers to produce a highly biased report that omits the findings of its own engineers.”

The World: What is Really Happening (Murray)

[..] the OPCW Fact Finding Mission reflected in their final report none of the findings of their own sub-group of university based engineers from two European universities, but instead produced something that is very close to the amateur propaganda “analysis” put out by Bellingcat. The implications of this fraud are mind-blowing. The genuine experts’ findings were completely suppressed until they were leaked last week. And still then, this leak – which has the most profound ramifications – has in itself been almost completely suppressed by the mainstream media, except for those marginalised outliers who still manage to get a platform, Robert Fisk and Peter Hitchens (a tiny platform in the case of Fisk).


Consider what this tells us. A fake chemical attack incident was used to justify military aggression against Syria by the USA, UK and France. The entire western mainstream media promoted the anti-Syrian and anti-Russian narrative to justify that attack. The supposedly neutral international watchdog, the OPCW, was manipulated by the NATO powers to produce a highly biased report that omits the findings of its own engineers. Which can only call into doubt the neutrality and reliability of the OPCW in its findings on the Skripals too. There has been virtually no media reporting of the scandalous cover-up. This really does tell you a very great deal more about how the Western world works than the vicissitudes of the ludicrously over-promoted Theresa May and her tears of self pity.

Read more …

Fragmentation is the key word. But the big power blocks will remain, courtesy of the EU structure. Salvini’s Lega may become the largest single party in Europe, but the real power lies in those blocks.

Europeans Vote, With EU Future In Balance (R.)

Europeans vote on Sunday in an election expected to further dent traditional pro-EU parties and bolster the nationalist fringe in the European Parliament, putting a potential brake on collective action in economic and foreign policy. Polls opened at 7 a.m. (0400 GMT) in the east of the bloc and will finally close at 11 p.m. (2100 GMT) in Italy. Seven states have already voted, with 21 joining in on Sunday in what is the world’s biggest democratic exercise after India. Right-wing populists top opinion polls in two of the big four member states – Italy and supposedly exiting Britain – and could also win in a third, France, rattling a pro-Union campaign championed by centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

However, exit polls in some countries that have already voted have given pro-EU parties some comfort. The Dutch Labour party, all but written off, looks to have finished first, helped by the visibility of having the EU socialists’ lead candidate, current EU deputy chief executive Frans Timmermans. In the Netherlands pro-Union parties scored 70%, up three points on the last European Parliament vote in 2014, and left the upstart anti-immigration party of Thierry Baudet fourth on 11%. The Dutch also turned out in bigger numbers, albeit at just 41%, reinforcing hopes in Brussels of reversing a 40-year trend of declining turnout that critics cite as a “democratic deficit” that undermines the legitimacy of European Union lawmaking.

An exit poll after Friday’s vote in deeply pro-EU Ireland pointed to an expected “Green Wave”. Across the bloc, concerns about climate change and the environment may bolster the pro-EU Greens group and could mean tighter regulations for industry and for the terms the EU may set for partners seeking trade accords. Britain also voted on Thursday and a new party focused on getting out of the EU was forecast by pre-vote opinion polls to come top, but there has been no exit poll data. Attention there has focused on the resignation of Prime Minister Theresa May. Results will be out late on Sunday, when all countries have voted.

[..] Matteo Salvini’s League in Italy may pip the Christian Democrats of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the bloc’s power broker, to become the biggest single party in the 751-seat chamber. Right-wing ruling parties in Poland and Hungary, defying Brussels over curbs to judicial and media independence, will also return eurosceptic lawmakers on Sunday.

Read more …

Grandma does.

Who Gets To Choose The UK’s Next Prime Minister? (BBC)

With Theresa May finally on her way out of Downing Street, a Tory leadership contest that has been bubbling under for months is now starting. It’s a two-stage process. The first sees votes among Conservative MPs designed to whittle the contenders down to just two front-runners. The second stage sees the party’s grassroots members choose between them in a postal ballot. In other words, it is members of the public – those who pay £25 a year to join the Conservative Party – who get the final say on who the next prime minister is. There will not be a general election because the party is already in power. So, who are its members and what do they think on key issues, not least of course Brexit?

We don’t know exactly how many Conservative Party members there are because – unlike the UK’s other parties – the Conservatives don’t regularly release the figures. The last time they did so was back in March 2018, when they put the figure at 124,000. That’s larger than some of the more pessimistic guesstimates, but way down on the peak of nearly three million that the party boasted in the early 1950s. Membership plunged after that before levelling off at around one million in the 1970s and 1980s, since when it has been dropping almost inexorably. One thing we can be sure of, however, is that the Tories have far fewer members than the Labour Party. Even if we assume that Labour’s membership has fallen from the late 2017 peak of more than 550,000, it still has a huge advantage over the Conservatives when it comes to campaigning on the ground.


[..] What Tory members haven’t cooled on, however, is Brexit. Indeed, since we started tracking them in 2015, they’ve hardened their position. It is clear that they are not supporters of the deal negotiated by their outgoing leader. In fact, it is now the case that fully two-thirds of them back a no-deal Brexit – an outcome supported by only a quarter of voters as a whole. Nor are they in the least bit keen on the idea of letting the public have another say on the UK’s EU membership. Some 84% of them oppose the idea of a new referendum on the issue. In short, the grassroots aren’t simply sceptical on Europe; they can’t wait to leave, whatever that might take. This, then, is the Conservative Party electorate. And those MPs hoping to succeed Mrs May will need to pitch their promises accordingly.

Read more …

Bubble. Tesla is brought to you by the Fed.

Elon Musk Confronts The “Bear Case” (VF)

Don’t say “death spiral,” but Tesla has unquestionably entered a perilous new era. Last September, a month after Elon Musk’s notorious “funding secured” tweet, I wrote a New York Times opinion piece about the fact that the real problem at Tesla, Musk’s electric-car company, was not necessarily Musk’s irresponsible, and perhaps illegal, behavior as C.E.O. Rather, it was the Tesla balance sheet, which was larded with $11 billion in debt, some $1.7 billion of which needed to be paid off before November 2019. Debt isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when a company doesn’t have the operating earnings to service that debt, a single dollar of debt can be too much. And then it becomes more like a Ponzi scheme, which, to be honest, Tesla is increasingly resembling.


Can Tesla convince investors to give it enough new capital to pay off the maturing debt before the world concludes that the company doesn’t have the resources to meet its obligations as they become due? That, of course, is the textbook definition of a bankrupt company. When I last wrote about Tesla, the company’s stock was trading at $300 per share, giving Tesla a market capitalization of around $51 billion. Nowadays, Tesla’s stock is trading around $190 per share and the company is valued at around $34 billion. That’s a loss of a cool $17 billion for equity investors, in eight months. In November, Tesla repaid $230 million of convertible debt with some of its cash pile instead of converting the debt to equity because its stock price was well below the conversion price. In March, Tesla paid off another $920 million in convertible notes in cash, again because its stock price was below the conversion price.

Read more …

..eating a corn chip produced from Bt corn might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories, possibly for the rest of our lives.”

You Will Probably Never Want To Eat GMO Food Again (Snyder)

In recent years, researchers have been pushing the boundaries of biology in order to come up with new “plant-based” alternatives to existing food products. Essentially, “synthetic biology” is being used “to create life forms from scratch”… Impossible’s “bleeding” veggie burger, shrimp made of algae, and vegan cheeses that melt are all making their way into restaurants and on to supermarket shelves, offering consumers a new generation of plant-based proteins that look, act, and taste far more like the real thing than ever before. What consumers may not realize, however, is that many of these new foods are made using synthetic biology, an emerging science that applies principles of genetic engineering to create life forms from scratch.

[..] “GM corn and cotton are engineered to produce their own built-in pesticide in every cell. When bugs bite the plant, the poison splits open their stomach and kills them. Biotech companies claim that the pesticide, called Bt — produced from soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis’ has a history of safe use, since organic farmers and others use Bt bacteria spray for natural insect control. Genetic engineers insert Bt genes into corn and cotton, so the plants do the killing.” The Bt-toxin produced in GM plants, however, is thousands of times more concentrated than natural Bt spray, is designed to be more toxic, has properties of an allergen, and unlike the spray, cannot be washed off the plant.” Do you think that it is actually safe to eat such “food”?

Sadly, the health consequences from eating GMO food may not just be temporary. In fact, one study found that the effects of eating genetically-modified food could last for a lot longer that anyone had anticipated… “The only published human feeding study revealed what may be the most dangerous problem from GM foods. The gene inserted into GM soy transfers into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function. This means that long after we stop eating GMOs, we may still have potentially harmful GM proteins produced continuously inside of us. Put more plainly, eating a corn chip produced from Bt corn might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories, possibly for the rest of our lives.”

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Without the precautionary principle, it’s certain that we will poison our children and not realize it until it’s too late.

Glyphosate Exposure Linked to Fatty Liver Disease in Humans (BP)

Glyphosate weed killers may be contributing to the growing worldwide epidemic f non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a condition that causes swelling of the liver, and can eventually lead to cirrhosis, cancer, or liver failure. Researchers at the University of California (UC) San Diego found that higher levels of glyphosate detected in urine corresponded significantly with individuals that have also been diagnosed with NAFLD. Advocates are urging lawmakers at every level to respond to the accumulating science on the danger of glyphosate herbicides, ban their use, and adopt policy changes that put into place organic land management practices.


“There have been a handful of studies, all of which we cited in our paper, where animals either were or weren’t fed Roundup or glyphosate directly, and they all point to the same thing: the development of liver pathology,” said Paul J. Mills, PhD, professor and chief in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health at UC San Diego School of Medicine in a press release. [..] With glyphosate still the most popular herbicide used in the U.S., exposure to the chemical is alarmingly widespread. “The increasing levels [of glyphosate] in people’s urine very much correlates to the consumption of Roundup [glyphosate] treated crops into our diet,” said Dr. Mills. He cautions that the results need further follow up, and there may be other pesticides in the environment leading to similar disease outcomes. “There are so many synthetic chemicals we are regularly exposed to,” Dr. Miller notes. “We measured just one.”

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Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment, until it’s a memory.
– Dr. Seuss

 

 

 

 

Jun 242018
 
 June 24, 2018  Posted by at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  12 Responses »


Ivan Aivazovsky The Ninth Wave 1849

 

Mueller’s Fruit of the Poisonous Tree (WSJ)
Refugees Now Make Up 1% Of The World’s Population (Wef)
There’s No Migration Crisis – The Crisis Is Political Opportunism (G&M)
Divided EU Leaders Convene For Emergency Talks On Migration (R.)
Italy Says ‘Arrogant’ France Could Become Main Enemy On Migration (R.)
Xi Says China Must Lead Way In Reform Of Global Governance (R.)
Turkey’s Erdogan Faces Resurgent Opposition In Twin Election Test (AFP)
Huge Anti-Brexit Demonstration Throngs Central London (G.)
Airbus Warns Of Harsh Brexit Reality With 100,000 Jobs Under Threat (Ind.)
Bitcoin Drops to $5,860, Lowest since October 2017 (WS)
The Eurozone Isn’t Ready For The Next Big Shock (Pol.eu)
Shooting The Messenger: Criminalising Journalism (G.)

 

 

Two lawyers in the WSJ warning that the FBI had so tainted the process, Mueller should at a minimum pause his investigation.

Mueller’s Fruit of the Poisonous Tree (WSJ)

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation may face a serious legal obstacle: It is tainted by antecedent political bias. The June 14 report from Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, unearthed a pattern of anti-Trump bias by high-ranking officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Some of their communications, the report says, were “not only indicative of a biased state of mind but imply a willingness to take action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.” Although Mr. Horowitz could not definitively ascertain whether this bias “directly affected” specific FBI actions in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, it nonetheless affects the legality of the Trump-Russia collusion inquiry, code-named Crossfire Hurricane.

Crossfire was launched only months before the 2016 election. Its FBI progenitors—the same ones who had investigated Mrs. Clinton—deployed at least one informant to probe Trump campaign advisers, obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wiretap warrants, issued national security letters to gather records, and unmasked the identities of campaign officials who were surveilled. They also repeatedly leaked investigative information.

Mr. Horowitz is separately scrutinizing Crossfire and isn’t expected to finish for months. But the current report reveals that FBI officials displayed not merely an appearance of bias against Donald Trump, but animus bordering on hatred. Peter Strzok, who led both the Clinton and Trump investigations, confidently assuaged a colleague’s fear that Mr. Trump would become president: “No he won’t. We’ll stop it.” An unnamed FBI lawyer assigned to Crossfire told a colleague he was “devastated” and “numb” after Mr. Trump won, while declaring to another FBI attorney: “Viva le resistance.”

[..] The totality of the circumstances creates the appearance that Crossfire was politically motivated. Since an attempt by federal law enforcement to influence a presidential election “shocks the conscience,” any prosecutorial effort derived from such an outrageous abuse of power must be suppressed. The public will learn more once the inspector general finishes his investigation into Crossfire’s genesis. But given what is now known, due process demands, at a minimum, that the special counsel’s activity be paused. Those affected by Mr. Mueller’s investigation could litigate such an argument in court. One would hope, however, that given the facts either Mr. Mueller himself or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would do it first.

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War and peace.

Refugees Now Make Up 1% Of The World’s Population (Wef)

If all the world’s refugees came together as a single nation they would collectively create one of the largest countries on Earth. According to the UNHCR, there are now almost 70 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, around 1% of the world’s population – the highest number in modern history. The number of refugees has steadily increased since 1951 but has jumped dramatically in the last 10 years. That’s mostly because of the Syrian civil war which began in 2011 and has since forced millions to flee their homes and seek refuge in neighbouring countries and in Europe. The most recent Global Peace Index, an annual report produced by Australian think tank the Institute for Economics and Peace, has found that for the fourth year in a row, overall levels of peace around the world have deteriorated.

92 countries have seen declining peace, while 71 countries have improved. Increased terrorist activity, conflicts in the Middle East and rising tensions in Eastern Europe and north-east Asia have all contributed to declining levels of peace. Even the most peaceful regions in the world according to the index – Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, and South America – have all recorded declines. The rising number of refugees and heightened political tensions in Europe and the US have meant that even stable countries have seen their scores lowered. For instance, 23 out of 36 countries in Europe deteriorated last year. Now in its seventh year of civil war, Syria is the least peaceful country in the world, along with Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq and Somalia.

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But the article above talks about the highest number of refugees in history.

There’s No Migration Crisis – The Crisis Is Political Opportunism (G&M)

“Desperate times at our southern border call for desperate measures on the other side:” That was the very loud message from right-wing leaders in the United States and Europe this week. Their desperate measures shocked the world. The Trump administration’s policy requiring thousands of infants and children to be seized from their parents and held in detention left leaders and citizens aghast (and its most inhumane elements remain in place). On the other side of the Atlantic, we watched the new Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini order boatloads of migrant families turned back into the sea, following his call last year to deal with immigration with a “mass cleansing, street by street, quarter by quarter.”

Most reasonable people agree that these are not humane ways to deal with what these politicians call a “migration emergency.” But too many people take their word that there actually is some sort of a migration emergency. To be clear: There is no immigration crisis in 2018. Not in the United States, not in Europe, not in Canada. “It is not a migration emergency – it’s a political emergency,” William Lacy Swing, the American director-general of the International Organization for Migration, said this week. The IOM’s 8,400 staff monitor the movement of people around the world, and while they’ve identified plenty of challenges, there aren’t any overwhelming or unmanageable movements of people this year. “The overwhelming majority of migration is taking place in a regular, safe and orderly fashion,” he said.

“There is a very serious problem of communication, but what we’re seeing is that the numbers are pretty modest,” said Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD, which advises 34 countries (including the United States and Canada) on immigration policy, this week released its annual report on migration levels in OECD countries. It showed a fall in numbers to ordinary, non-crisis levels. The United States has always had movement, some of it undocumented, across its southern border. The 2018 numbers are somewhat higher than the 2017 numbers – but they’re a small fraction, less than a third, of the rate experienced in the 2000s under George W. Bush, or in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, or in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. Since 2008, illegal crossings have fallen to lows not seen since the early 1970s.

What has risen, since 2014, has been the far smaller fraction of people on the Mexican border who are refugee claimants from Guatemala, Honduras and especially El Salvador. Those countries are experiencing crises of political and civic violence, and those fleeing have legitimate claims for asylum under the Refugee Convention, to which Washington subscribes. They are not illegal and they’re certainly not dangerous.

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No agreement seems possible anymore.

Divided EU Leaders Convene For Emergency Talks On Migration (R.)

European Union leaders gather in Brussels on Sunday in an attempt to bridge their deep divisions over migration, an issue that has been splitting them for years and now poses a fresh threat to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Though arrivals across the Mediterranean are only a fraction of what they were in 2015, when more than a million people reached Europe, a recent opinion poll showed migration was the top concern for the EU’s 500 million citizens. Under heavy pressure from voters at home, EU leaders have been fighting bitter battles over how to share out asylum seekers in the bloc. Unable to agree, they have become more restrictive on asylum and tightened their external borders to let fewer people in.

They have given money and aid to countries in Northern Africa and the Middle East to keep people from heading for Europe. Only 41,000 refugees and migrants have made it to the EU across the sea so far this year, U.N. figures show. But the issue has in the meantime won and lost elections for politicians across the bloc from Italy to Hungary, with voters favoring those advocating a tougher stance on migration. On Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron said France favored financial sanctions for EU countries that refuse migrants with proven asylum status. Merkel is under pressure because her longtime conservative allies, Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU), have threatened to start turning away at the German border all asylum seekers already registered elsewhere in the EU unless the bloc reaches an agreement on distributing them more evenly.

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Not smart Macron.

Italy Says ‘Arrogant’ France Could Become Main Enemy On Migration (R.)

Italy on Saturday said “arrogant” France risked becoming its “No.1 enemy” on migration issues, a day before European leaders convene in Brussels for a hastily arranged meeting on the divisive topic. In answer to comments by French President Emmanuel Macron, who said migration flows toward Europe had reduced compared with a few years ago, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio said Macron’s words showed he was out of touch. “Italy indeed faces a migration emergency and it’s partly because France keeps pushing back people at the border. Macron risks making his country Italy’s No.1 enemy on this emergency,” Di Maio wrote on his Facebook page.

Macron said European cooperation had managed to cut migration flows by close to 80 percent and problems stemmed from “secondary” movements of migrants within Europe. “The reality is that Europe is not experiencing a migration crisis of the same magnitude as the one it experienced in 2015,” the French president said. “A country like Italy has not at all the same migratory pressure as last year. … The crisis we are experiencing today in Europe is a political crisis.” But Italy’s Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said his country had faced 650,000 arrivals by sea over the past four years, 430,000 asylum requests and the hosting of 170,000 “alleged refugees” for an overall cost of more than 5 billion euros ($5.8 billion).

“If for the arrogant President Macron this is not a problem, we invite him to stop insulting and to show instead some concrete generosity by opening up France’s many ports and letting children, men and women through at Ventimiglia,” he said in a statement, referring to the northwestern Italian town at the border with France.

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Filling a void.

Xi Says China Must Lead Way In Reform Of Global Governance (R.)

China must lead the way in reforming global governance, the foreign ministry on Saturday cited President Xi Jinping as saying, as Beijing looks to increase its world influence. China has sought a greater say in global organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF and UN, in line with its growing economic and diplomatic clout. Since taking office in late 2012, Xi has taken a more muscular approach, setting up China’s own global bodies like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and launching his landmark Belt and Road project to build a new Silk Road. Beijing has cast itself a responsible member of the international community, especially as President Donald Trump withdraws the United States from agreements on climate change and Iran, and as Europe wrestles with Brexit and other issues.

China must “uphold the protection of the country’s sovereignty, security and development interests, proactively participate in and show the way in reform of the global governance system, creating an even better web of global partnership relationships”, Xi said in comments reported at the end of a two-day high-level Communist Party meeting. This would help create conditions for building a modern, strong socialist country, the ministry cited him as saying at the meeting attended by officials from the foreign and commerce ministries, the military, the propaganda department and the Chinese embassy in the United States.

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Blocking the opposition from TV.

Turkey’s Erdogan Faces Resurgent Opposition In Twin Election Test (AFP)

Turks began voting Sunday in dual parliamentary and presidential polls seen as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s toughest election test, with the opposition revitalised and his popularity at risk from growing economic troubles. Erdogan has overseen historic change in Turkey since his Islamic-rooted ruling party first came to power in 2002 after years of secular domination. But critics accuse the Turkish strongman, 64, of trampling on civil liberties and displaying autocratic behaviour. Polling stations opened at 0500 GMT and were due to close at 1400 GMT, with the first results expected late in the evening.

Over 56 million eligible voters can for the first time cast ballots simultaneously in the parliamentary and presidential elections, with Erdogan looking for a first round knockout and an overall majority for his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). But both these goals are in doubt in the face of an energetic campaign by his rival from the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP), Muharrem Ince, who has mobilised hundreds of thousands in mega rallies, and a strong opposition alliance in the legislative polls. Erdogan remains the favourite to hold on to the presidency – even if he needs a second round on July 8 – but the outcome is likely to be much tighter than he expected when calling the snap polls one-and-a-half years ahead of schedule.

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It’s going to take demos ten times that size. You need millions on the streets.

Huge Anti-Brexit Demonstration Throngs Central London (G.)

At least 100,000 people took to the streets yesterday as part of the largest ever demonstration of support for a new referendum over Britain’s final Brexit deal. With more businesses poised to issue dire Brexit warnings this week and senior Tories already drawing up plans to soften Theresa May’s exit proposals, organisers of the march on Sunday said it showed Britain’s departure from the European Union was not a “done deal”. A former aide to Margaret Thatcher, several Labour MPs and pro-EU campaigners from across Britain took part in the demonstration, marking two years since the Brexit vote. Organisers said that people from every region and walk of life were among those who took part in the march down Whitehall.

Conservative supporters marched alongside Labour voters and Liberal Democrats during the protest, which saw angry denunciations of the chaos that has ensued inside government since the Brexit vote. Labour’s leadership also came under pressure at the march for refusing to back a second public vote. There were chants of “Where’s Jeremy Corbyn” from the crowd. The Labour leader was on a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp. Anger on the streets at the prime minister’s handling of the Brexit negotiations is being accompanied by a renewed push from industry to ensure that trade with Europe is not disrupted as a result of leaving. More prominent manufacturing firms are set to issue warnings about Britain’s Brexit negotiations within days, after Airbus and BMW broke cover to say they could reconsider their UK investment plans unless a Brexit deal was reached keeping Britain closely aligned with Europe.

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Reality should dawn on the British people.

Airbus Warns Of Harsh Brexit Reality With 100,000 Jobs Under Threat (Ind.)

“The dawning of reality,” is how Tom Williams, the chief operating officer of Airbus, described it, after warning that Airbus is seriously considering pulling out of the UK in the event of a no deal Brexit. It’s worth taking a moment to consider what that would mean. The firm employs 14,000 people directly in this country. It has provided 4,000 high quality apprentices over the last decade, thus supporting a flagship policy of the Government. It contributed £1.7bn to the UK exchequer in tax last year, before you consider the economic contributions of its employees, who are in well paid, unionised jobs. It is estimated that Airbus supports another 86,000 people through its supply chain, bringing the total number of jobs at risk to 100,000.

The companies in that supply chain, and their employees, further add to the tax take, and contribute to the economy. If, when, Airbus does go, if it seeks alternatives when it comes to the production of its wings, those jobs will not be replaced. Once they are gone, they are gone. Perhaps the Brextremists expect the people who held them to pick the fruit that the soft fruit industry has been warning about rotting in the fields for months? It once again puts the shockingly mendacious talk by ministers of a “Brexit dividend” to fund the NHS – even Chancellor Philip Hammond has now descended into that pit – into context. The economic damage if Airbus goes, and if other companies; car makers, and their suppliers, for example, do the same, no one will be talking about dividends. Quite the reverse.

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Wolf Richter is no fan.

Bitcoin Drops to $5,860, Lowest since October 2017 (WS)

Bitcoin dropped to $5,860 at the moment, below $6,000 for the first time since October 29, 2017. It has plummeted 70% in six months from the peak of $19,982 on December 17. There have been many ups on the way down, repeatedly dishing out fakes hopes, based on the ancient theory that nothing goes to hell in a straight line (chart via CoinMarketCap): If you’re a True Believer and you just know that bitcoin will go to $1 million by the end of 2020, as promised by a whole slew of gurus, including John McAfee – “I will still eat my dick if wrong,” he offered helpfully on November 29 – well you probably don’t need this sort of punishment. You’re suffering enough already. And I apologize. I feel your pain.

I was a true believer too a few times, and every single time it was a huge amount of fun, and I felt invincible and indestructible until I got run over by events. With 17.11 million bitcoins circulating today, if bitcoin were at $1 million today, it would amount to a market cap of $17 trillion. But new bitcoins are constantly being created out of nothing (“mined”) by computers that suck up enormous amounts of electricity. And by the end of 2020, there will be many more bitcoins, and if the price were $1 million each, the total would amount to about the size of US GDP. This doesn’t even count all the other cryptos that would presumably boom in a similar manner, amounting perhaps to half of global GDP, or something.

People who promote this brainless crap are either totally nuts or the worst scam artists. But I feel sorry for the True Believers whose fiat money got transferred and will continue to get transferred from them to others. So OK, there’s still some time left. It’s not the end of 2020 yet. And True Believers still have room for the fake hope of a $1-million bitcoin. But at the moment, bitcoin is even worse – incredibly – than one of the worst fiat currencies in the world, the Argentine peso, which has plunged “only” 35% over the period during which bitcoin plunged 70%. That takes some doing!

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France and Germany should stop trying to dictate the future. It will backfire.

The Eurozone Isn’t Ready For The Next Big Shock (Pol.eu)

The return to economic growth in the eurozone has produced a dangerous sense of complacency on the Old Continent, especially in the richer countries of the north. But Italy’s flirtation with an exit from the euro under a populist government is a stark reminder that, if left unaddressed, the deep structural weaknesses that plague the single currency could trigger an existential crisis across the EU. It would be a mistake, therefore, to believe we can drive along in business-as-usual mode, or just take a few small steps toward more European integration. This week’s Meseberg Declaration signed by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, although a step in the right direction, is part of a collective denial about what needs to be done.

You don’t need to be a populist to recognize that Europe’s monetary union is dysfunctional and in dire need of more substantial reforms than those proposed by Germany and France. To keep the single currency alive, it needs two major structural improvements. First, it needs to reduce the fragmentation in Europe’s banking system that has caused the Continent to experience more severe crises than other parts of the world — most notably in comparison to the U.S. Second, it has to develop a streamlined and legitimate decision-making process to respond quickly and boldly to the next major recession.

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Amen.

Shooting The Messenger: Criminalising Journalism (G.)

The fact that during the 10 years he was in office, the US president, Barack Obama, prosecuted more whistleblowers than all the presidents in US history combined is an indication of the increasing threat to journalism. In 2017 the head of the CIA questioned the first amendment rights which protect free speech, and the US attorney-general threatened that the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, would be prosecuted (for what he was not clear). Both are acts of intimidation designed to silence. It has been argued that governments are not that concerned about most of the work that journalists do so, for most, concerns about surveillance are unnecessary. But the problem there is that, generally speaking, if governments are not worried about what journalists are doing, the journalists are not doing their jobs.

Reporting local news may be a useful social function, but the issues that arise where nations go to war, or where countries are involved in breaking the law, or plundering the treasure of other nations, are of great importance and need investigating. It is in these significant areas that journalists must be protected from the vested interests of the executive state; where the very people who make the decisions, as in the Iraq war, need to be exposed and held to account before the event, not after it. What is so disturbing is that the media has often aided and abetted governments and the intelligence agencies – who always want more access to information – as they invoked the fear of terrorism as grounds for introducing tougher surveillance laws.

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May 182018
 


Leonard Misonne Waterloo Place, London 1899

 

Let me start by saying I have nothing against the English newspaper The Guardian. They publish some good things, on a wide range of topics. But they also produce some real stinkers. And lately they seem to publish quite a few of those. On Wednesday there was an entire series of hit pieces on Julian Assange, which I wrote about in I Am Julian Assange.

And apparently they’re not done. As I said on Wednesday, the relationship between Assange and the paper has cooled considerably, after The Guardian’s initial cooperation with Wikileaks on files Assange had shared with them. But does that excuse hit pieces, personal attacks, innuendo, suggestive and tendentious writing, in bulk?

There was one more article in the hit pieces series on Wednesday:

Assange ‘Split’ Ecuador And Spain Over Catalan Independence

Julian Assange’s intervention on Catalan independence created a rift between the WikiLeaks founder and the Ecuadorian government, which has hosted Assange for nearly six years in its London embassy, the Guardian has learned. Sources who spoke on condition of anonymity said Assange’s support for the separatists, including a meeting in November, led to a backlash from Spain, which in turn caused deep concern within Ecuador’s government. While Assange’s role in the US presidential election has been an intense focus of US prosecutors, his involvement in Spanish politics appears to have caused Ecuador the most pain.

The Ecuadorians cut Assange’s internet connection and ended his access to visitors on 28 March, saying he had breached an agreement at the end of last year not to issue messages that might interfere with other states. Quito has been looking to find a solution to what it increasingly sees as an untenable situation: hosting one of the world’s most wanted men.

In November 2017, Assange hosted two supporters of the Catalan independence movement, whose push for secession from Spain had plunged the country into its worst political crisis since returning to democracy. Assange has said he supported the right to “self-determination” and argued against “repression” from Madrid.

He was visited by Oriol Soler, a Catalan businessman and publisher, and Arnau Grinyó, an expert in online communications campaigns. Their meeting, which was reported by the Spanish press, took place a little over a month after the unilateral Catalan independence referendum, and 13 days after the Spanish government responded to the unilateral declaration of independence by sacking the administration of the then Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, and assuming direct control of the region.

I think that’s we call ‘leading’. Terminology like “..Assange’s role in the US presidential election..”, “..one of the world’s most wanted men..”, “..unilateral referendum..”, “..unilateral declaration of independence..”, are suggestive, they are meant to paint a picture in the reader’s head. What’s missing is any and all mention of the brutal violence in Catalunya on referendum day. That, too, has a purpose.

Assange has been a vocal critic of Madrid’s handling of the Catalan crisis and described the independence movement as “the redefinition of the relationship between people and state”, and “the most disciplined Gandhian project since Gandhi”. A Spanish diplomat told the Guardian that Spain “conveyed a message” to Ecuadorian authorities that Assange was using social media to support the secessionist movement and sending out messages “that are at odds with reality”.

A billion people have been critics of what happened around the referendum. So why not Assange? For what reason did he need to be shut up? Everyone can speak their mind, but not him? We no longer have freedom of speech? Isn’t that something a newspaper, most of all, first of all, should stand up for? An embassy of a democratic nation? No, not a word.

[..] “Spain has, on a number of occasions, informed the Ecuadorian authorities of its concerns over the activities that Julian Assange has engaged in while in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.” [..]In December, Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, reminded Assange that he should refrain from trying to intervene in Ecuadorian politics.

US intelligence agencies and Spanish authorities have separately claimed that Russia has had a hand in their domestic affairs. US agencies have accused WikiLeaks of working with Russian intelligence to try to disrupt the US election by releasing hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and Spanish officials have suggested that much of the messaging on social media about the Catalan crisis originated in Russia.

Obviously, Assange has never interfered in Ecuadorian politics. That’s just utter nonsense. But that last bit takes the cherry. There is no proven link between Assange and Russia. There is no proven link between Russia and US elections. There is no proven link between Russia and hacked emails. There is no proof the emails were hacked. And as for Russia interfering in the Catalan referendum: oh, please.

Is this just very very bad journalism, or is it something more? You be the judge. But beware that almost all of this stuff consists of insinuations. It’s an affront to journalism.

Glenn Greenwald interviewed Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa after the Guardian pieces came out:

Ecuador’s Ex-President Denounces Treatment of Julian Assange as “Torture”

Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, in an exclusive interview with The Intercept on Wednesday morning, denounced his country’s current government for blocking Julian Assange from receiving visitors in its embassy in London as a form of “torture” and a violation of Ecuador’s duties to protect Assange’s safety and well-being. Correa said this took place in the context of Ecuador no longer maintaining “normal sovereign relations with the American government — just submission.”

Correa also responded to a widely discussed Guardian article yesterday, which claimed that “Ecuador bankrolled a multimillion-dollar spy operation to protect and support Julian Assange in its central London embassy.” The former president mocked the story as highly “sensationalistic,” accusing The Guardian of seeking to depict routine and modest embassy security measures as something scandalous or unusual.

[..] Correa continues to believe that asylum for Assange is not only legally valid, but also obligatory. “We don’t agree with everything Assange has done or what he says,” Correa said. “And we never wanted to impede the Swedish investigation. We said all along that he would go to Sweden immediately in exchange for a promise not to extradite him to the U.S., but they would never give that. And we knew they could have questioned him in our embassy, but they refused for years to do so.” The fault for the investigation not proceeding lies, he insists, with the Swedish and British governments.

But now that Assange has asylum, Correa is adamant that the current government is bound by domestic and international law to protect his well-being and safety. Correa was scathing in his denunciation of the treatment Assange is currently receiving, viewing it as a byproduct of Moreno’s inability or unwillingness to have Ecuador act like a sovereign and independent country.

Maybe we should suggest that somebody may have interfered in Ecuador’s presidential elections?! You know, to get to Assange?!

Then today we read in the Guardian that in the aftermath of its hit series, Ecuador has dismissed security for Assange. Is this when MI6 and the CIA get to move in?

Ecuador To Remove Julian Assange’s Extra Security From London Embassy

The president of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, has ordered the withdrawal of additional security assigned to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has remained for almost six years. The move was announced a day after an investigation by the Guardian and Focus Ecuador revealed the country had bankrolled a multimillion-dollar spy operation to protect and support Assange, employing an international security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and even the British police.

Over more than five years, Ecuador put at least $5m (£3.7m) into a secret intelligence budget that protected him while he had visits from Nigel Farage, members of European nationalist groups and individuals linked to the Kremlin.

[..] Ecuador suspended Assange’s communication systems in March after his pointed political comments on Twitter. Assange had tweeted messages challenging Britain’s accusation that Russia was responsible for the poisoning of a Russian former double agent and his daughter in Salisbury.

What? Ecuador muted Assange because he challenged Britain’s accusation -unfounded as far as we can tell- that Russia poisoned the Skripals? But wait. I thought they cut him off because of Spain? Or the US? Now it’s Britain? Everyone and their pet hamster is suspicious of that Skripal story. But again, Assange is not allowed to be?

Oh, and all the terrible, and terribly suspicious, people that came to see him. “Nationalists” and “individuals linked to the Kremlin.” Leading, suggestive, truly repugnant “journalism”.

But then, also today, that same Guardian gives the floor to Melinda Taylor, one of Assange’s lawyers. Do they think that giving her a voice makes up for all the damage they’ve done to Assange, to themselves, to freedom of speech and to journalism? One might be tempted to think so.

Julian Assange Is Suffering Needlessly. Why Not Report That?

Breaking news: a series of articles has been published by the Guardian concerning Julian Assange, splashed over the front pages. The big reveal? That after the UK threatened to invade the Ecuadorean embassy, Ecuador beefed up its security and surveillance at said embassy. And that this costs money. And there is pressure to find a solution to a situation that has been described by the United Nations as illegal and arbitrary detention.

Lost in the lede was this: that Ecuador appears to be hoping “that Assange’s already uncomfortable confinement will become intolerable”. The Oxford dictionary defines “intolerable” as “unbearable, insufferable, unsupportable, insupportable, unendurable, beyond endurance, unacceptable, impossible, more than flesh and blood can stand, too much to bear, past bearing, not to be borne, overpowering (…)”.

Isn’t the headline story that the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks remains detained without access to fundamental healthcare? And since March this year, has been cut off from the outside world, bar meetings with his lawyers, which have apparently been surveilled?

Assange has won numerous awards for publishing information that has exposed egregious violations of human rights and abuses of state power. He has also won the more dubious prize of being placed in the crosshairs of US government attempts to silence free speech by silencing the publications and publishers that dare to speak freely.

 

And if only the ongoing Julian Assange tragedy was the only affront to news gathering. But no, there’s still always the Skripals. It looks like the gag order has been lifted. Yesterday, the Sun, which at least doesn’t pretend to be a quality paper, ran this:

Sergei Skripal Still Being Questioned Over Salisbury Nerve Agent Attack

Detectives are still questioning poisoned spy Sergei Skripal as he recovers in hospital, nearly 10 weeks after being attacked with a nerve agent, Sky News has learned. They are trying to piece together the Russian former double agent’s life in retirement in Britain, as more details emerged of his recent activities. They want to know more about his regular train journeys to London, his trips abroad, and his monthly meetings with his alleged former MI6 handler in a Salisbury restaurant. It was reported this week that the 66-year-old had been briefing intelligence agencies in the Czech Republic and Estonia on Russian spies and their methods, giving one lecture as recently as 2016.

Would that activity, years after arriving in Britain in a spy swap with Moscow, have been motive enough for the murder attempt on him and his daughter Yulia? The government insists the Kremlin was responsible for the attack, in which the deadly nerve agent novichok was smeared on the front door handle of Mr Skripal’s Salisbury home. But former KGB officer and espionage historian Alexander Vassiliev said it was more likely the work of the Russian mafia, out to embarrass Vladimir Putin’s regime.

Mr Vassiliev said: “It wasn’t the reason to kill him. I’m sure when Putin released him, and pardoned him, he knew Skripal would be co-operating with British secret services and other European espionage agencies. “All defectors are doing it, they work as consultants, they give lectures, they write books – it’s a normal thing. He had to earn his living somehow – he wouldn’t have been a taxi driver. “Skripal was arrested in 2004 – that was a long time ago and he didn’t know specific details about current objectives or operatives. The Russian government had no reason to kill Skripal – he was nobody and he wasn’t a danger.

Now, that’s funny. He’s been briefing Czech intelligence. The Czech Republic, we learned recently, is one of a group of countries that have the formula for novichok AND have produced small quantities of it. The “it could only have been Russia” narrative is, based on what we know, dead as a door handle.

That was yesterday. And lo and behold, this morning the Guardian writes that Skripal has been discharged from hospital. They got all the info they wanted out of him?

Sergei Skripal Discharged From Salisbury Hospital

The Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal, who was exposed to a nerve agent, has been discharged from Salisbury district hospital, health officials have said. Skripal’s release follows that of his daughter, Yulia, and DS Nick Bailey, who were also exposed to novichok in March. The hospital said: “While these patients have now been discharged, their right to patient confidentiality remains and limits us from giving detailed accounts of the treatment these individuals received. “However, treating people who are so acutely unwell, having been poisoned by nerve agents, requires stabilising them, keeping them alive until their bodies could produce more enzymes to replace those that had been poisoned.”

Yup, we’re sticking with the ‘novichok from Russia’ story. We’re not going to provide any proof, you will have to believe us. I think that’s the frame we must see this last article in, easily one of the weirdest things I’ve read in a while. And again it’s from the Guardian. “As if” to emphasize the dark and massive threat that is hanging over Britain. Create an atmosphere, paint a picture. Julian Assange and the Russians (and Trump!) against Spain, the US and Britain, those staunch defenders of human rights and ‘our values’.

Almost 100 Police Have Received Psychological Help After Salisbury Attack

Almost 100 Wiltshire police officers and staff have sought psychological support after the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the Guardian can reveal. Among those who have asked for help were officers who initially responded to the collapse of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, and those who were at or close to the various investigation sites in subsequent days and weeks. Some reported feeling disorientated and anxious while others were concerned about the possible long-term health effects on the public.

Wiltshire’s chief constable, Kier Pritchard, told the Guardian that officers – including himself and other police personnel continued to receive help more than two months after the attack. Pritchard took up the role of head of the force on the day of the attempted murders and said he had personally received the “best support” as he worked through the implications for him and his family of being a high-profile figure in the response to a state-sponsored attack.

One police officer, DS Nick Bailey, spent more than two weeks in hospital after being exposed to the novichok nerve agent and when he was discharged said life would never be the same again.

 

You know who might have helped us try to find out what really happened to the Skripals? Julian Assange. But he’s been silenced. Where do we turn now? How do we find the truth anymore? Have we effectively all been silenced?

 

 

May 102017
 
 May 10, 2017  Posted by at 3:32 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  8 Responses »


Ray K. Metzker Philadelphia 1962

 

You might have thought, and hoped, that recent events, such as the election of Trump as president of the US, or Brexit, or the rise of Marine Le Pen and other non-establishment forces in Europe, would, as a matter of -natural- course, have led to increased conversation and discussion between parties, entities, whose divisions were material in sparking these events.

But the opposite has happened, and continues to happen at an ever faster and fiercer pace. Various sides of various divides become ever more deaf to what other sides have to say. What still poses as conversation turns into blame games and shouting matches replete with innuendo, fake news and insinuations.

The mainstream media even find they are to an extent redeemed by this -at least financially-. Formerly last-gasp ‘news sources’, suffering from the advent of the interwebs, like the New York Times, CNN, HuffPo and WaPo, as well as Fox, Breitbart on the other side, and many others, have seen their reader- and viewerships expand over the past year as they turned into increasingly impenetrable echo chambers.

They may be losing a lot of potential attention -and revenues- from one side of the -former- debate, but that is more than made up for by rising attention from their faithful flocks. The public feel they need to have an opinion on political matters, and the media are more than willing to define, construct and phrase that opinion for them, to first confirm what people already think, and then raise it a notch or two, or three, or ten.

It works like a charm, and their finance people are looking at the numbers saying: whatever it is you guys do, keep on doing it and add some more, because we’re selling like hotcakes. Still, at least some of the writers must be wondering what exactly it is they’re doing, wondering how to define ‘journalism’ in this day and age.

All this represents a giant loss, one that not a single democracy can arguably tolerate for long, even if few of us seem to care. In democracies, it’s essential that people who do not agree, talk to each other, and do so all the time. The end of that conversation spells the end of democracy.

 

If anything in the future is revealed about a possible -political- connection between Trump and Russia, it will be gravely tainted by the fact that so much opinion posing as news, and so much news that was not real news, has been published about that possible connection already over the past year and change, without any evidence. The WaPo’s and HuffPo’s of the world will not even be vindicated by such a potential revelation anymore, because they lowered their journalistic levels to match those of the National Enquirer.

But even writing down something as neutral as that last paragraph is prone to lead to demonization from all kinds of ‘sources’. The Russian hack story has embedded itself so profoundly in certain corners of American and European society that it can no longer be denied or even questioned without being interpreted as suspect, if not an outright admission of guilt. All you need to know is there once was PropOrNot and its list of alleged 200 Russian propaganda sites.

It doesn’t matter how often Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov and spokeswoman Maria Zakharova ask for proof of the accusations, because for a large and influential segment of western mainstream media that is a phase that has long since been passed. There is such an all-encompassing conviction that Russia hacked and otherwise influenced western elections that no proof is deemed necessary.

Or rather, the idea has taken on such a life of its own that things are taken to have been proven that never were. “News’, just like advertizing, has to a large extent become based on the concept of relentless repetition. Say something often enough and people will believe it, certainly when it confirms what they were looking to have confirmed to begin with. If the echo chambers fit enough lost souls, before you know it nobody asks for proof anymore.

 

It’s not about whether Trump is or has ever been guilty of anything he’s accused of, it’s that the insinuating narratives about that have long been written and repeated ad nauseam. It’s about whether the witch hunt exemplified by PropOrNot makes objective news gathering impossible. And the only possible response to that question must be affirmative. If only because you can’t tell one type of ‘news’ from the other anymore.

The MSM have focused on getting Hillary elected, and they failed miserably. So did she, of course, it wasn’t just them. A failure they attempt to hide from view behind a veil of never-ending anti-Russian stories that even now they still can’t prove. Which is where the FBI comes in. Sure, some of it may yet prove to be true, but even if that is so, that’s in the future, not today.

Does Trump deserve being resisted? It certainly looks that way much of the time. But he should be resisted with facts, not innuendo of yellow paper quality. That destroys the media, and the media are needed to maintain a democracy. That is both their task and their responsibility. They exist to inform people, but have instead turned into opinion-fabricating machines. Both because that expresses the opinions of their ownership, and because it’s commercially more attractive.

Take a step back and oversee the picture, and you’ll find that Trump is not the biggest threat to American democracy, the media are. They have a job but they stopped doing it. They have turned to smearing, something neither the NYT nor the WaPo should ever have stooped to, but did.

 

Democracy is not primarily under threat from what one party does, or the other, or a third one, it is under threat because parties have withdrawn themselves into their respective echo chambers from which no dialogue with other parties is possible, or even tolerated.

None of this is to say that there will be no revelations about some ties between some Russian entities or persons and some Trump-related ones. Such ties are entirely possible, and certainly on the business front. Whether that has had any influence on the American presidential election is a whole other story though. And jumping to conclusions because it serves your political purposes is, to put it mildly, not helping.

The problem is that so much has been said and printed on the topic that was unsubstantiated, that if actual ties are proven, that news will be blurred by what was insinuated before. You made your bed, guys.

A lot of sources today talk about how Trump was reportedly frustrated with the constant focus on the alleged Russia ties, but assuming those allegations are not true, and remember nothing has been proven after a year of echo-chambering, isn’t it at least a little understandable that he would be?

Comey was already compromised from 10 different angles, and many wanted him gone, though not necessarily at the same time . The same Democrats, and their media, who now scream murder because he was fired, fell over themselves clamoring for his resignation for months. That does not constitute an opinion, it’s the opposite of one: you can’t change your view of someone as important as the FBI director every day and twice on Sundays without losing credibility.

And yes, many Republicans played similar games. It’s the kind of game that has become acceptable in the Washington swamp and the media that report on it. And many of them also protest yesterday’s decision. Ostensibly, it all has to do not with the fact that Comey was fired, but with the timing. Which in turn would be linked to the fact that the FBI is investigating Trump.

But what’s the logic there? That firing Comey would halt that investigation? Why would that be true? Why would a replacement director do that? Don’t FBI agents count for anything? And isn’t the present investigation itself supposed to be proof that there is proof and/or strong suspicion of that alleged link between Russia and the Trump election victory? Wouldn’t those agents revolt if a new director threw that away with the bathwater?

Since we still run on ‘innocent until proven guilty’, perhaps it’s a thought to hold back a little, but given what we’ve seen since, say, early 2016, that doesn’t look like an option anymore. The trenches have been dug.

These are troubled times, but the trouble is not necessarily where you might think it is. America has an undeniable political crisis, and a severe one, but that’s not the only crisis.

 

 

Jan 222017
 
 January 22, 2017  Posted by at 11:11 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Dorothea Lange Resettlement project, Bosque Farms, New Mexico 1935

The Inauguration, and the Counter-Inauguration (Atlantic)
White House Spokesman Slams Media In Bizarre First Briefing (ZH)
The Demons Have Been Unchained (HB)
How the NYT Plays with History (Robert Parry)
Any Country Leaving Euro Zone Must Settle Bill First: ECB’s Draghi (R.)
Trump Team in Talks with UK on Post-Brexit Trade Deal (BBG)
Utopian Ideas On Climate Change Will Get Us Precisely Nowhere (G.)

 

 

The Automatic Earth ‘celebrates’ its 9th birthday today! Thank you Nicole first of all, and thank all of you, so much, for reading, for commenting, being involved, for your kind donations. A true honor and pleasure.

(Someone had to point it out to me, of course I forgot.)

 

 

I’ve tried hard to understand what the women were/are protesting, and what I find is I’m still confused, since it seems they protest anything and everything. Or, as the Atlantic puts it: “the Women’s March was a protest that celebrated protest.” Looks to me like a surefire recipe for handing it to Trump on a platter.

Trump seems to be part of what’s being protested, but what exactly? His “grab the pussy” nonsense? But that was years ago and he was talking about willing women. Stupid and ugly, but it doesn’t make him a threat to all women. His abortion stance? Some of his supporters are pro-lifers for sure, but so far nothing indicates he’ll lead some big turnaround on the issue.

What I think everybody needs to recognize is that there are, and especially will be, very obvious and clearly definable topics linked to this administration that should be vigurously protested and investigated. But this protest doesn’t do any such thing.

Neither does the Democratic party, who can’t locate their own asses anymore. And most of all neither do the media, which for example covered nothing yesterday but a piece of absurd briefing theater about the number of people attending the inauguration. Once again handing the floor to Trump. It’s embarrassing.

Pointing out silly things Trump says that you know everyone in your respective echo chambers will agree with you on is easy, and Trump will keep feeding you. What it is not, though, is journalism. Or politics, for that matter. Or meaningful protest.

The role of Trump, I think, in America, must be that of a wake-up call. But nobody’s waking up.

The Inauguration, and the Counter-Inauguration (Atlantic)

In the middle of the National Mall, on the same spot that had, the day before, hosted the revelers who had come out for the inauguration of Donald Trump, a crowd of people protesting the new presidency spontaneously formed themselves into a circle. They grasped hands. They invited others in. “Join our circle!” one woman shouted, merrily, to a small group of passersby. They obliged. The expanse—a small spot of emptiness in a space otherwise teeming with people—got steadily larger, until it spanned nearly 100 feet across. If you happened to be flying directly above the Mall during the early afternoon of January 21, as the Women’s March on Washington was in full swing, you would have seen a throng of people—about half a million of them, according to the most recent estimates—punctuated, in the middle, by an ad-hoc little bullseye.

“What is this circle about?” a woman asked one of the circle-standers. “Nobody knows!” the circle-stander replied, cheerfully. The space stayed empty for a moment, as people clasped hands and looked around at each other with grins and “what-now?” expressions. And then: A woman ran through the circle, dancing, waving a sign that read “FREE MELANIA.” The crowd nodded approvingly. Another woman did the same with her sign. A group of three teenage boys danced with their “BAD HOMBRE” placards. The crowd whooped. Soon, several people were using the space as a stage. A woman dressed as a plush vulva shimmied around the circle’s perimeter. The circle-standers laughed and clapped and cheered. They held their phones in their air, taking pictures and videos. They cheered some more.

The Women’s March on Washington began in a similarly ad-hoc manner. The protest sprang to life as an errant idea posted to Facebook, right after Trump won the presidency. The notion weathered controversy to evolve into something that, on Saturday, was funereal in purpose but decidedly celebratory in tone. The march, in pretty much every way including the most literal, opposed the inaugural ceremony that had taken place the day before. On the one hand, it protested President Trump. Its participants wore not designer clothes, but jeans and sneakers and—the unofficial uniform of the event—pink knit caps with ears meant to evoke, and synonymize, cats. It had, in place of somber ritual, a festival-like atmosphere. It featured, instead of pomp and circumstance, people spontaneously breaking into dance on a spontaneously formed dance floor.

And yet in many ways, the march was also extremely similar to the inauguration whose infrastructure it had co-opted, symbolically and otherwise, for its own purposes. The Women’s March on Washington shared a setting—the Capitol, the Mall, the erstwhile inaugural parade route—with the ceremonies of January 20. And, following an election in which the victor lost the popular vote, the protest seems to have bested the inauguration itself in terms of (physical) public turnout. During a time of extreme partisanship and division—a time in which the One America the now-former president once spoke of can seem an ever-more-distant possibility—the Women’s March played out as a kind of alternate-reality inauguration: not necessarily of Hillary Clinton, but of the ideas and ideals her candidacy represented. The Women’s March was an installation ceremony of a sort—not of a new president, but of the political resistance to him.

“I DO NOT ACCEPT THIS FILTHY ROTTEN SYSTEM,” read one sign, carried by Lauren Grace, 35, of Philadelphia. She got the quote from Dorothy Day. And she intended it, Grace explained to me, to protest “a system that sort of left me out.” “We’re told that voting is a sacred right in this country,” Grace said. “But even though Hillary won the popular vote, she still lost. I feel pretty conflicted about a country where that could happen.”

The Women’s March was, to be sure, also a protest march in an extremely traditional vein: It featured leaders—celebrities, activists, celebrity activists—who gave speeches and offered performances on a stage with the Capitol in its background; its participants held signs, and chanted (“This-is-what-a-feminist-looks-like!,” “No-person-is-illegal!”), and commiserated. It was also traditional in that its participants were marching not for one specific thing, but for many related aspirations. Women’s reproductive rights. LGBTQ rights. Immigration rights. Feminism in general (“FEMALES ARE STRONG AS HELL,” one sign went, riffing off a famous feminist’s Netflix show). The environment (“CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL,” “MAKE THE PLANET GREAT AGAIN”). Science (“Y’ALL NEED SCIENCE”). Facts (“MAKE AMERICA FACT-CHECK AGAIN”). Some signs argued for socialism. Some argued against plutocracy. Some argued for Kindness. Some pled for Peace. Some simply argued that America is Already Great.

This was a big-tent protest, in other words—a messy, joyful coalescence of many different movements. The Women’s March deftly employed, in its rhetoric, the biggest of the big-tent tautologies: The point of this protest wasn’t so much the specific things being protested as it was the very bigness of the crowds who were doing the protesting. This was another way the protest alternate-realitied the presidential inauguration: Just as the official ceremony is meant to celebrate not only the person occupying the presidency, but the presidency itself, the Women’s March was a protest that celebrated protest.

Read more …

Tyler Durden gets the essence: ..what he is seeing is that he once again is controlling the media narrative, which is focusing on a very immaterial and arbitrary issue, instead of spending time on investigative work and reporting on far more serious issues relating to Trump’s new administration.

White House Spokesman Slams Media In Bizarre First Briefing (ZH)

In a bizarre first briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday unloaded a blistering attack on the media and accused it of false reporting about the otherwise irrelevant question of why Trump’s inauguration crowd was visibly smaller than that of Obama’s. Spicer used up virtually all the time in his first official appearance in the Press Briefing Room to denounce news organizations’ focus on the inaugural crowd size, saying “these attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.” We wouldn’t necessarily use those words: silly should suffice since if Trump really wanted to “defend” why fewer people attended his inauguration, he can simply say many more of his supporters are employed and had to be at work on Friday, than during either Obama’s 2009 or 2013 inauguration events.

However, the press secretary decided that hyperbole is the better part of valor and said “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the world” Spicer made the allegation despite photographs of the event clearly showed that the Mall was not full in the sections Spicer described, with dwindling-to-nonexistent crowds near the Smithsonian Institution Building and west toward the Washington Monument. There was also sparse attendance along the parade route from the Capitol to the White House. He alleged that some photos of the inauguration were “intentionally framed in a way” that minimized the crowd, without providing examples or evidence.

No official agency provides estimates of the size of gatherings on the Mall. But photos taken from the same vantage point at about the same time of day show that the crowds were far smaller than for President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, which Washington city officials estimated at 1.8 million people.Ultimately, the whole press briefing episode had a surreal undertone, one in which Trump, via his speaker, appears to continue to troll the press, now in the White House. As a seemingly perturbed NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen summarized it “Wow. Sean Spicer walked to the podium. Unloaded on the media for bias. Accused reporters of dishonesty. Walked off without taking questions.” The reaction among the rest of the press was similar.

Spicer took no questions from reporters and he did not say specifically how many people the White House believes attended the inauguration. He said three large sections of the Mall that each held at least 200,000 people were “full when the president took the oath of office.” Earlier on Saturday, in remarks at CIA headquarters in Langley, Trump said that from his vantage point at the podium, “it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there, and they said Donald Trump did not draw well.” Trump also said parts of the National Mall “all the way back to the Washington Monument” were “packed.”

Quoted by Bloomberg, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Twitter after Spicer’s remarks that “This is called a statement you’re told to make by the president. And you know the president is watching.” He is indeed, and what he is seeing is that he once again is controlling the media narrative, which is focusing on a very immaterial and arbitrary issue, instead of spending time on investigative work and reporting on far more serious issues relating to Trump’s new administration.

Read more …

The German press is just like the American one, clinging to consensus, hanging on to what is already lost: “Not only Democrats are hoping for an impeachment proceeding.”

The Demons Have Been Unchained (HB)

That was no presidential speech; that was a veritable declaration of war. Threatening in tone. Cold and calculating in logic. Change minus the hope. Donald Trump used the traditional Inauguration Day address to settle a score with the U.S. political establishment going back decades. With four ex-presidents sitting a few feet behind him, the 45th president delivered a populist manifesto. Until his victory, the nation’s political elite used days like these, he told America, to celebrate amongst themselves. Their triumph was not your triumph. Their well-being was not your well-being. But this time, power would transfer not just from one party to the other, but from Washington back to the people. In the people’s name, he will put America “first.” In their name, he will “take back” America’s factories.

In their name, he will “exterminate” Islamic terrorism, end inner-city drug gang “bloodbaths” and get NATO partners like Germany to pay more for Europe’s security. In domestic policy, the Trump agenda sounds like a blueprint for civil war; in foreign policy, it sounds like the dawn of a new ice age. Not that he’s cold-bloodedly planning either one, but he knows where his fiery rhetoric will lead him. The new president loves a good fight, not consensus. He doesn’t want to hug, but to smother, to overwhelm. Yesterday was his day, but the days that follow may belong to his opponents. There are three main opponents that could bring him down politically.

Opponent No. 1: The other America. Across the country, an anti-Trump movement is growing. While only 10,000 people came to an open-air concert in Washington celebrating his victory on the night before the inauguration, 20,000 people took to the streets in New York to protest his elevation. Their signs shouted: Not My President. The security and surveillance costs around Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 56th Street, is costing taxpayers about a half million dollars – each day.

Opponent No. 2: The Media. Among publishers, producers, filmmakers and journalists, Trump has hardly any friends. CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Hollywood couldn’t warm to the volcanic personality of the new president. Even an unbroken Twitter assault has no chance against such a monolithic wall of media rejection. He hates them, and they hate him right back. He pushes forward his agenda, and they push back unabashedly with theirs. Trump enters The White House with the lowest approval rating ever of an elected president.

Opponent No. 3: The Political Party System. Washington is having an allergic reaction to Trump. Democrats and even Republicans are cooperating on Capitol Hill to investigate the Trump team’s contacts to Russia in a special committee. House Speaker Paul Ryan doesn’t see himself as a Trump follower but as a Trump successor. He is the wolf in sheep’s clothing, biding his time, waiting for an opening. Put another way: Not only Democrats are hoping for an impeachment proceeding. America is now on the brink of a new period of polarization. The demons in this fraternal battle have been unchained. The greatness that Trump seeks will not be borne under these conditions. An icy wind is blowing across the land.

Read more …

Good overview by veteran Parry of late 20th century false news campaigns, Nixon vs Johnson, Reagan vs Carter and more.

How the NYT Plays with History (Robert Parry)

Whenever The New York Times or some other mainstream news outlet holds itself out as a paragon of professional journalism – by wagging a finger at some pro-Trump “fake news” or some Internet “conspiracy theory” – I cringe at the self-delusion and hypocrisy. No one hates fake news and fact-free conspiracy theories more than I do, but the sad truth is that the mainstream press has opened the door to such fantasies by losing the confidence of the American people and becoming little more than the mouthpiece for the Establishment, which spins its own self-serving narratives and tells its own lies. Rather than acting as a watchdog against these deceptions, the Times and its mainstream fellow-travelers have transformed themselves into little more than the Establishment’s apologists and propagandists.

If Iraq is the “enemy,” we are told wild tales about how Iraq’s non-existent WMD is a danger to us all. If Syria is in Washington’s crosshairs, we are given a one-sided account of what’s happening there, black hats for the “regime” and white hats for the “rebels”? If the State Department is backing a coup in Ukraine to oust an elected leader, we are regaled with tales of his corruption and how overthrowing a democratically chosen leader is somehow “democracy promotion.” Currently, we are getting uncritical stenography on every conceivable charge that the U.S. government lodges against Russia. Yet, while this crisis in American journalism has grown more severe in recent years, the pattern is not entirely new. It is reflected in how the mainstream media has missed many of the most significant news stories of modern history and has, more often than not, been an obstacle to getting at the truth.

Then, if the evidence finally becomes so overwhelming that continued denials are no longer tenable, the mainstream media tries to reclaim its tattered credibility by seizing on some new tidbit of evidence and declaring that all that went before were just rumors but now we can take the long whispered story seriously — because the Times says so.

Read more …

How long before Brussels starts begging countries to stay, offering deals and discounts?

Any Country Leaving Euro Zone Must Settle Bill First: ECB’s Draghi (R.)

Any country leaving the euro zone would need to settle its claims or debts with the bloc’s payments system before severing ties, ECB President Mario Draghi said. The comment – a rare reference by Draghi to the possibility of the currency zone losing members – came in a letter to two Italian lawmakers in the European Parliament released on Friday. It coincides with a groundswell of anti-euro sentiment in Italy and other euro zone states, fueled in part by last June’s unprecedented decision by Britain to leave the European Union. “If a country were to leave the Eurosystem, its national central bank’s claims on or liabilities to the ECB would need to be settled in full,” Draghi said in the letter.

Based on data to end-November from the Target 2 payment system, that would leave Italy with a €358.6 billion ($383.1 billion) bill. The system records flows of payments between euro zone countries. The threat of defaults on cross-border debts has often been credited as one element keeping the euro zone together throughout the financial crisis. As these payments are not generally settled, weaker economies including Italy, Spain and Greece have accumulated huge liabilities towards Target 2 while Germany stands out as the biggest creditor with net claims of €754.1 billion. Target 2 imbalances have worsened in recent months, with Harvard economist Carmen Reinhart warning of capital flight from Italy.

Read more …

Am I wrong in thinking the UK will have a very hard time signing any deal as long as it’s part of the EU? What are the odds of that even being legal in the first place?

Trump Team in Talks with UK on Post-Brexit Trade Deal (BBG)

The Trump administration this week will begin laying groundwork for a trade deal between the U.S. and the U.K. that would take effect after Britain leaves the European Union, a White House aide said. Prime Minister Theresa May last week declared Britain is “open for business” as she announced plans to pursue a clean break with the EU, paving the way for the U.K. to eventually strike new trade accords with the continent and other countries. May is to visit Washington this week. Trump officials believe their discussions with her government encouraged May to be more aggressive in exiting the union. She can use any American support to argue the U.K. will prosper outside the bloc although she risks inflaming tensions with EU leaders if they suspect her government is actively negotiating trade deals while still an EU member.

Two of President Donald Trump’s senior advisers, Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, met with U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in New York on Jan. 8. The three are preparing for the future pact, the aide said, requesting anonymity because the discussions aren’t public. Bannon, Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and other administration officials have also met with British defense and intelligence leaders, the aide said. President Barack Obama warned in April that if the U.K. pursued Brexit, the country would go to the “back of the queue” for U.S. trade deals. U.K. voters chose to leave the EU anyway in a June referendum, and Trump now appears to be scrapping Obama’s position on the matter. Trump’s team is also considering a deal to reduce barriers between U.S. and British banks, the Sunday Telegraph reported, citing officials from both sides.

Trump has tapped Woody Johnson, the billionaire owner of the New York Jets NFL team, to serve as U.S. ambassador to the U.K., a person familiar with the matter said on Jan. 19. May and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto will make visits to the U.S. this month to meet with Trump, White House officials said. May will meet with Trump on Jan. 27, White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee said on Saturday. Pena Nieto will meet with Trump on Jan. 31, said White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

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The author starts out promising, then gets lost in the woods.

Utopian Ideas On Climate Change Will Get Us Precisely Nowhere (G.)

Urging people to stop consuming stuff in order to slow the rate of climate change is a gambit that is doomed to fail. It would be helpful if shoppers put off buying a suit or installing a new kitchen, but it’s not going to happen. Demonising those who fly to Barcelona for a long weekend is another tactic that will have almost no impact. It’s not for nothing that economists base many of their assumptions on populations having unlimited wants. Most people strain to acquire stuff that the rich have long taken for granted. Telling them to switch off this desire has never worked and is unlikely to do so now, even when the future of the planet is at stake. In this vein, the accession of Donald Trump to the presidential throne should not be read as a spectacular one-off reaction by a narrow, if electorally important group who missed out on GDP growth.

Consumption is how most people measure progress, and that will still be the case next year and in 10 years’ time, when Trump is long gone. Take a look at the figures for flights in and out of the UK, home of some the world’s busiest airports. City Airport, which is embarking on a £344m expansion, saw 4.3 million passengers in 2015. Heathrow, which has the government’s blessing for its own multibillion-pound development, welcomed 75 million passengers in the same year, Gatwick broke 40 million, and Stansted hit double-digit growth with 22.5 million passengers. Last year, Manchester airport boasted annual growth of 11% after it attracted 23.7 million passengers. And these figures don’t include the huge amount of imported and exported goods that flow through Britain’s airports.

If it’s true that trade is in the UK’s DNA – and the figures support this – any government, of whatever colour, will think twice before standing in the way of airport expansion. That doesn’t mean governments should not think about air travel when searching for ways to tackle climate change. Aircraft makers should be forced to make their planes more efficient, and airport owners must clean up the pollution they create. But this is an exercise in minimising the impact of flying, given that its expansion is inevitable. The same analysis should have applied to the country’s steel plants –and to its other polluting industries. Without a reduction in steel consumption, we must live with its continued production.

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Nov 072016
 
 November 7, 2016  Posted by at 10:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


NPC Auto wreck, Washington, DC April 1917

Betting Sites See Record Wagering On US Presidential Election (R.)
When Might We Know Who Won? Potentially Hours Earlier Than Usual (BBG)
Could Trump Or Clinton Face Impeachment As President? (John Crudele)
This Election Has Disgraced the Entire Profession of Journalism (Silverstein)
Much More Than Trump (Repost), by Robert Gore
Private Capital Allocation As Inefficient As In Great Depression (Beversdorf)
Housing ‘Wealth Creation’ Leads To National Wealth Destruction (Janda)
China Might Finally Give Wall Street What It Wants – 20 Years Late (WSJ)
Hong Kong Derails Property Streetcar (BBG)
Negative Bond Yields in Japan Don’t Look So Bad With Deflation (BBG)
Architect Of Euro In Stark Warning (BBC)
Obama Aiming To Make Lasting Impression With Athens Speech (Kath.)
Erdogan Blasts West As Turkey’s Kurdish Party Boycotts Parliament (R.)
Great Barrier Reef: What Have We Left For Our Children? (Naomi Klein)

 

 

How fitting.

Betting Sites See Record Wagering On US Presidential Election (R.)

The raucous, passionate and unpredictable 2016 U.S. presidential election is on track to notch another distinction: the most wagered-upon political event ever. With many opinion polls showing a tight race just one day before Tuesday’s election, record numbers of bettors are pouring millions into online platforms from Ireland to Iowa in the hope of capturing a financial windfall from a victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump. UK-based internet betting exchange Betfair said on Sunday its “Next President” market was set to become the most traded it had ever seen and expected to surpass even Brexit. By Sunday, roughly $130 million had been traded on who will become the next U.S. president, compared with $159 million on the Brexit referendum, Betfair spokeswoman Naomi Totten said.

The amount bet so far on the 2016 contest dwarfs the roughly $50 million laid on the 2012 race. “We think it is because (of) how raw the Brexit (vote) is in people’s minds – they’re not convinced yet that it’s a done deal,” Totten said. Most polls leading into Britain’s June 23 referendum predicted Britons would choose to remain in the EU. Instead, they voted to leave by a 52% to 48% margin. Betfair’s “Next President” market was by far the largest of more than 70 markets on the site related to the U.S. election. As of Friday, some $140 million has been put into play on markets ranging from who will win the popular vote to how many states each party will carry. On Ireland’s Paddy Power, which merged with Betfair earlier this year, the U.S. presidential election “is definitely on course to be the biggest political event,” said spokesman Féilim Mac An Iomaire. The site has had about $4.38 million bet on the race so far.

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Who needs the west?

When Might We Know Who Won? Potentially Hours Earlier Than Usual (BBG)

4. When might the public know who won? Potentially hours earlier than usual.

5. Why’s that? There’s a wrinkle this year that might undermine the tradition of major television networks holding off declaring a new president until polls close on the West Coast. Exit polling available to the networks and the Associated Press, combined with early returns in key districts, can point to a likely winner hours before the polls close. Since 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory was called while West Coast polls were still open – spurring complaints that some voters didn’t see any reason to go to the polls — networks have resisted calling winners until a given state’s polls have closed.

6. Who’s challenging that arrangement this year? A startup company called VoteCastr plans to collect data from seven battleground states – Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – on Election Day, stream it through a mobile app and use it “to generate minute-by-minute projected outcomes.” The news website Slate.com will publish VoteCastr’s findings as they come in. “Publishing our data will help level the playing field, so that voters know as much as campaigns do,” Slate’s editor, Julia Turner, said.

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Not easy. Entirely new information would be needed.

Could Trump Or Clinton Face Impeachment As President? (John Crudele)

[..] .. might it be possible for Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings immediately after their swearing-in as president, whoever wins? I asked professor Eric Schickler, who is the chairman of Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. “That is an interesting question”, Schickler said. “The conventional understanding of impeachment is that it is due to actions taken while in office. That is how it has traditionally been applied. But impeachment, as anyone who has lived through the Nixon and Bill Clinton eras knows, is ultimately a political decision”, says Schickler. “The Constitution does not define ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’, which is supposed to be the standard for an impeachable offense. “As such, there is discretion for Congress to define its range”, he added.

But Schickler says it would be a “serious case of political overreach for Congress to impeach after an election for actions taken before a person is in office. That s particularly so where those actions were known at the time of the election itself”, he says. OK, my turn again. So what he s saying is that an impeachment proceeding right after the election would really piss voters off. Then, how about a month after inauguration? Or six months? Or a year from now, when the economy still isn t buzzing (as it s unlikely to be) and people have had enough of our new president – whoever that may be. So let’s figure out what crimes we can come up with for Trump and Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s crimes are obvious. Her opponent has described her as a liar and a crook, and so have I.

She has nearly been indicted twice, and could easily have other offenses that are lurking in the background. She’s become very wealthy because of connections made while in public service. She’s had numerous shady real estate deals and even had a commodities transaction – admittedly long ago – that reeked. And there’s the e-mail controversy. And perhaps lying to Congress and the FBI. And things that may have occurred at the Clinton Foundation. And on and on and on. And if the Republicans keep control of Congress, it’s anyone’s guess if they will go after her. Trump’s “crimes” are a little harder to spot. He’s a pig, that’s for sure. But pinching someone in a bar or saying vulgar things on camera aren’t really impeachable unless, of course, the enemies in his own party decide that they’d prefer vice presidential candidate Mike Pence as a substitute.

Professor Michael J. Gerhardt, the Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that a president “may be impeached based on serious misconduct committed prior to the time the individual entered the office he or she currently occupies.” A federal district judge, for instance, got impeached (which is like an indictment) and convicted for lying on a questionnaire he needed to fill out for the job. But there’s a catch, says Gerhardt. The misconduct has to be serious — which is a tricky term to define — and not considered at the time of the election. “It becomes a trickier case if the American people can be said to have ‘ratified’ the prior misconduct” by electing that person.

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Planet Ponzi speaks.

This Election Has Disgraced the Entire Profession of Journalism (Silverstein)

There’s nothing secret about the media’s anti-Trump stance. A formal declaration of war was launched on August 7, when Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times media columnist, wrote a story under the headline, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism.” Rutenberg wrote that journalists were in a terrible bind trying to stay objective because Trump, among other things, “cozies up to anti-American dictators,” has “put financial conditions on the United States defense of NATO allies,” and that his foreign policy views “break with decades-old …consensus.” Rutenberg made clear that he and other reporters viewed “a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous,” which required them to report on him with a particularly critical point of view. This, he said, would make journalists “move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional,” which would be “uncomfortable and uncharted territory.”

There are so many things wrong with all this that it’s hard to know where to start. Rutenberg’s comment about dictators was clearly a reference to Vladimir Putin, who is an authoritarian leader who Trump, to his shame, admires. However, Russia is not the world’s worst dictatorship — and has been far more effective at fighting ISIS than the Obama administration — and Hillary’s cordial relationship with the Saudi regime, to cite just one example, seems far more dangerous. But rethinking “the alliances that have guided our foreign policy for 60 years” — the alliances that have resulted in non-stop war since 9/11 and the U.S.’s current involvement in seven overseas conflicts — is not an acceptable position for a presidential candidate in Rutenberg’s view.

Furthermore, how is it that the media has derogated to itself the right to decide what candidates deserve special scrutiny and what policies are acceptable? In a democracy, that is supposed to be the voters’ job. And worst of all is Rutenberg’s statement about the role of journalists. “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed,” I.F. Stone once wrote. “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations,” said George Orwell. For those two self-evident reasons, being “oppositional” is the only place political journalists should ever be, no matter who is in power or who is campaigning. But for Rutenberg and the New York Times being oppositional is only “uncomfortable” when it comes to covering Hillary Clinton.

It didn’t seem uncomfortable at all when it came to running a story about Trump’s taxes based on three pages of a decades-old tax return that was sent anonymously or when it ran another story with the headline, “The 282 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List.” All during the campaign we have watched Hillary Clinton rehearse campaign themes and, almost as if by magic, the media amplifying those themes in seeming lockstep. The hacked emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta have demonstrated that this was not mere happenstance, but, at least in part, resulted from direct coordination between the Clintonistas and the press.

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“..a chasm that cannot be straddled..”

Much More Than Trump (Repost), by Robert Gore

While the Kennedy assassination offered the American public a glimpse into the heart of darkness, only a few independent-minded skeptics challenged the Warren Commission whitewash. Vietnam was different; hundreds of thousands returned knowing not just that the so-called best and brightest couldn’t win the war, but that for years they had lied to the American public. In the following decades, it had to have been especially galling for the Vietnam veterans that the hippies, draft-deferred campus protesters, the “fortunate sons” (google Credence Clearwater Revival) whose numbers never came up, and the mockers of the values they held dear ended up among the elite. The Clintons, of course, became the prime example.

Disaffected veterans were the core of a group that would grow to millions, their “faith” in government and the people who ran it obliterated by its repeated failures and lies. Revolutions dawn when an appreciable number of the ruled realize their rulers are intellectual and moral inferiors. The mainstream media is filled with vituperative, patronizing, and insulting explanations of what’s “behind” the Trump phenomenon. It all boils down to revulsion with the self-anointed, incompetent, pretentious, hypocritical, corrupt, prevaricating elite that presumes to rule this country. It is, in a word, inferior to the populace on the other side of the yawning chasm, the ones they have patronized and insulted for decades, and the other side knows it.

Peggy Noonan is one of the few mainstream writers who has tried to understand, rather than insult or condemn, the Trump phenomenon. In a widely cited article, she ascribed it to the split between the “protected,” those who run the government and its allied institutions, and the “unprotected,” the government’s and its allies’ victims (“Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected,” The Wall Street Journal, 2/25/16). It was a nice try, but Ms. Noonan is attempting to straddle a chasm that cannot be straddled. She writes for the Journal, an establishment organ, some of whose writers have been either so clueless or disingenuous that they have denied the existence of an establishment. And ultimately, the protected-unprotected differentiation doesn’t fly.

Most Trump supporters don’t want the government to do something for them; they want the government to quit doing things to them. They viscerally revile the elite—it’s personal—and they want no part of that class or its government. They know how to take care of themselves, and many know the government hurts the most those whom it ostensibly protects.

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Whet can be done when demand is set to be weak for a long time?

Private Capital Allocation As Inefficient As In Great Depression (Beversdorf)

1) Economic policy objectives (monetary and fiscal) are meant to incentivize domestic private business investment, which drives incomes and the money multiplier effect, i.e. the engine of the economy.

2) Economic policy objectives have failed because CEO’s, the private capital allocators, simply cannot accommodate business investment when the demand function is as weak as we currently find it, no matter how available and how cheap the capital.

3) The demand function is weak because we misunderstood and ignored the side effects of trade policies and their reliance on new world economies that naturally have a lower money multiplier effect than old world economies.

4) A materially damaged demand function leads to a misallocation of resources; for the past 15 years capital has been and continues at an accelerating rate to be allocated to cash distribution (the most economically inefficient use of capital) rather than investment, further deteriorating the demand function (economic death spiral).

5) The only question that matters now then is; How do we get private sector capital allocators to allocate capital more efficiently? I’ll give you a hint, it requires indications of sustainable demand improvement and neither monetary nor fiscal policy have the capacity to generate sustainable demand improvement when the demand function is damaged to the point that CEO’s refuse to invest productively. This then requires a new economic policy framework, one that CAN generate sustainable demand improvement, which will allow capital allocators to invest productively.

We can understand the problem without villainizing any particular stakeholders by focusing on where we are today and delivering a viable solution. Mistakes were made and judging whether they were honest or malicious in nature is irrelevant to finding the solution. Our focus here is a solution.

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Bloated home prices strangle consumption, which is typically 50-70% of GDP.

Housing ‘Wealth Creation’ Leads To National Wealth Destruction (Janda)

Robertson cites two brunches a week, two coffees a day and a $60 dinner a week as areas where many Gen Ys could save some cash. Aside from the many responses I’ve heard from Gen Ys who don’t spend anything like this much on such items, when you add up the savings it really isn’t that much. On Robertson’s figures one could save just under $6,000 a year. Let’s be extra tight arse and cut out the booze, say $50 a week for $2,600 a year, save another $1,000 by holidaying up the coast in a caravan park instead of heading overseas and $400 more through buying cheaper clothes. So let’s assume it’s reasonable to cut $10,000 in expenses and let’s also assume, even though it’s unlikely given their other spending habits, that our hypothetical Gen Y already saves $5,000 a year from their post-tax, post-HECS/HELP repayment income.

With a median home price of $800,000 in Sydney, it would take a single person more than a decade to save a deposit, so more than five years for a couple who were both saving $15,000 a year. But first time buyers shouldn’t be buying the median, or middle-priced, home I hear boomers respond. Agreed. So let’s take the median apartment price instead. Given the number of studios and tiny one-bedders out there, the median unit price probably gets you a pretty small apartment within 10km of the CBD or a two-bedder somewhere further out. Surely the boomers can’t begrudge that as being excessively luxurious? That’s still $138,000 for a 20% deposit, not including stamp duty, legal and moving costs.

For a single person that’s still nine years of saving, or the best part of five for a couple, and that’s assuming home prices don’t keep rising faster than their incomes and the earnings on their savings, which has been the experience of the past four years. Even a deposit on a Melbourne apartment is six-and-a-half years of saving for a single and more than three years for a couple, again not including other unavoidable purchase costs. That’s the individual challenge that Gen Ys face, even those on pretty decent incomes which are becoming rarer in an increasingly part-time and casualised labour market. But what all of the analysis thus far has ignored is the macroeconomic cost. Imagine for a second that hundreds of thousands of Gen Ys gave up all their brunches and coffees – cafes across Australia would be going broke.

Who do they employ? Often Gen Ys. Likewise the restaurants, bars and retailers that would also be hit if Gen Y really did close their wallets completely. This illustrates the problem with an over-inflated housing market, it absolutely sucks the life out of every other part of the economy.

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“Chinese banks had a 10% share of investment-banking revenue in Asia [..] a decade ago… This year, that share has increased to 61%..”

China Might Finally Give Wall Street What It Wants – 20 Years Late (WSJ)

Beijing is considering allowing Wall Street firms to run their own investment-banking businesses on the mainland, according to people briefed on the discussions, a long-awaited step that would give them more access to China’s hard-to-crack domestic market. The move is being discussed as part of a new U.S.-China trade and investment framework. Firms such as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase potentially could operate investment-banking business in China on their own. Currently, the firms must pair with domestic brokerages in joint ventures. The people briefed on the discussions caution negotiations aren’t finalized. Details need to be hashed out with Chinese regulators, and any agreement would need to be ratified by the U.S. Senate.

The possibility of getting closer to the Chinese market is a breakthrough for Wall Street firms. Global banks have limited access to the $7.48 trillion stock markets of Shanghai and Shenzhen and China’s domestic bond market, compared with the ease they can operate in global markets such as London and Tokyo. Any change, however, would come at a late stage. China’s banks have large balance sheets and have become formidable rivals. The banks also have long relationships with corporate Chinese clients, some of whom may not recognize Western brand names.

Chinese banks had a 10% share of investment-banking revenue in Asia, excluding Japan and Australia, a decade ago, according to data provider Dealogic. This year, that share has increased to 61%, boosted by Chinese companies that prefer to do business with domestic firms. Although U.S. banks have spent heavily to bulk up operations in the region, their share has declined since 2000, from 43% to just 14% so far this year, according to Dealogic.

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Popping bubbles before they become tumors.

Hong Kong Derails Property Streetcar (BBG)

When pro-market authorities tamper with prices to cool asset bubbles, economists speak of “throwing sand in the wheels of finance.” Having emptied its bucket of sand without stanching the desire to own property, Hong Kong decided to derail the out-of-control streetcar in a pit of exorbitant taxation. Considering the more painful alternative, it’s a wise move. Now that foreigners, including all-important mainland Chinese buyers, must pay a 30% stamp duty to buy overpriced shoeboxes, transactions could drop by 70%, Bloomberg News reported. Weaker demand might jolt earnings of the city’s developers. That’s what the biggest drop in 16 months in Cheung Kong Property’s shares suggested Monday. A more violent reaction, which might have occurred as Hong Kong’s U.S.-linked interest rates rose, may have been avoided.

As Gadfly pointed out, Hong Kong property has been a magnet for the kind of speculative frenzy that Singapore managed to tame. A gush of money out of the People’s Republic and into something – anything – in Hong Kong is the main reason a skilled worker in the territory was being asked to hand over seven years’ more wages than his Singapore counterpart to own the roof over his head. Even as Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists are ticked off by Beijing for trying to chart an independent political course, the city can exert more control over its economic destiny by making the world’s least affordable housing a little less so. Not only will the 30% tax dissuade mainland buyers, it also could also put an end to speculative land purchases by Chinese developers.

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Well, let’s all get us some deflation then.

Negative Bond Yields in Japan Don’t Look So Bad With Deflation (BBG)

If you thought Japan’s negative yields don’t offer any value, take a look at the nation’s fall back into deflation. The 10-year Japanese government bond yield of minus 0.065% turns into a real yield of about 44 basis points, near a three-year high, after accounting for consumer prices. The figure beats the U.S. 10-year real yield of about 30 basis points. The Bank of Japan last week acknowledged its negative short-term interest rates and its plan to control the yield curve will need more time to push up living costs. It forecast 2% inflation won’t be achieved until the year ending March 2019. Bondholders are the beneficiaries, with Japan’s debt market little changed over the past month, even as Treasuries dropped 0.4%, based on the Bloomberg World Bond Indexes.

“Even with the BOJ being vigilant about controlling bond levels, Japanese yields are on a gradual declining path given the lack of conviction that prices will rise,” said Souichi Takeyama at SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. in Tokyo, a unit of Japan’s second-biggest lender. “There is a lack of concern about inflation.” The government will test demand when it sells 10-year debt Tuesday and 30-year bonds on Thursday. Japanese consumer prices are falling at a year-on-year pace of 0.5%, matching the biggest declines since 2013, giving bondholders reason to stick with the securities at a time when the central bank is trying to hold nominal 10-year yields at about zero. In the U.S., investors get 1.80%. Japan’s 40-year bond is more attractive at 0.575%, or a real yield exceeding 1%.

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Wonder how much he blames himself for.

Architect Of Euro In Stark Warning (BBC)

A founding father of monetary union has given a damning assessment of the euro bloc, saying that not incorporating an exit strategy was a mistake. Prof Otmar Issing told the BBC’s Wake up to Money that faultlines across the eurozone remain, citing economic weakness in Greece, Portugal and Italy. The ECB’s first chief economist also warned about the impact of negative interest rates. And he said political pressures threatened central banks’ independence. Prof Issing told the BBC that structural problems in the eurozone and dwindling public support in some countries were still major problems. The euro currency was “stable and performing much better than expected”, he said. “But I wish I could say the same about the euro area.”

Countries that tipped the bloc into recession during the global financial meltdown were still in serious economic trouble. Greece was in “permanent crisis”, and economic reforms in Portugal and Italy were either on hold or being reversed, the professor said. Prof Issing, a former adviser to Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, has in recent years become suspicious of the euro project he helped to create, warning that it would collapse without reform. He told the BBC that it was a “mistake in the construction of the whole arrangement that once a member, you remain a member for eternity”. It meant that countries not complying with the eurozone’s economic and budgetary rules “can blackmail the others”. Allowing a temporary exit would, for example, have helped Greece to reform its economy so that it could then return later in better financial health.

However, some countries should never have joined the euro in the first place, he said, without naming names. They “were not yet ready to thrive under a single monetary policy and one central bank”. Prof Issing is also increasingly concerned about central banks’ use of zero or negative interest rates in a bid to stimulate growth. The policy has been used by, among others, the ECB, Japan, Switzerland and Sweden It is hindering the recovery of banks, he said, adding: “If it persists for longer, then I think we will see dramatic consequences for insurance companies and pension schemes.” Furthermore, “the longer zero interest rates continue, the more difficult it will be to exit from this situation”.

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A lasting impression accompanied by Victoria Nuland and new ambassador to Greece Geoffrey Pyatt. Athens has better be very careful with the Ukraine star couple in place.

Obama Aiming To Make Lasting Impression With Athens Speech (Kath.)

US President Barack Obama is planning to deliver what American officials have described to Kathimerini as a “legacy speech” when he visits Athens on November 15. Although the details of the president’s trip have not been finalized, officials in Washington indicated that Obama intends to make a statement that resonates when he comes to Greece. One official likened it to the historic speech delivered by John F. Kennedy when he visited Berlin in 1962. Obama is expected to make extensive references to democracy and how it has endured in Greece despite its recent problems. The US president is also due to highlight the need for Athens to receive debt relief and for the Greek government to persist with structural reforms.

Obama is expected to tread carefully on the issue of debt so that his comments do not appear as an attack on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who he considers an important partner and who he will be visiting after his trip to Athens. Sources said that the American president’s speech will also contain a message for Turkey. Obama wants to draw attention to the refugee crisis during his visit to Greece but due to security concerns a visit to the island of Lesvos has been ruled out. There is, however, a possibility that he will visit a refugee camp in Attica.

It is not yet known who will accompany the American leader on his visit but the impression is that First Lady Michelle Obama will not accompany him on the trip. There has been no final decision on whether Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will also travel to Athens. It is considered likely that Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and Special Envoy for International Energy Affairs Amos Hochstein will be part of the team that will fly to Greece from Washington.

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Prediction: “we” are going to let this run awfully out of control.

Erdogan Blasts West As Turkey’s Kurdish Party Boycotts Parliament (R.)

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accused Europe on Sunday of abetting terrorism by supporting Kurdish militants and said he did not care if it called him a dictator. Turkey drew international condemnation for the arrest on Friday of leaders and lawmakers from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the second-largest opposition grouping in parliament, as part of a terrorism investigation. The government accuses the HDP, which made history last year by becoming the first Kurdish party to win 10% of the vote and enter parliament, of financing and supporting an armed Kurdish insurgency, which it denies. The HDP announced a partial boycott of parliament on Sunday, saying it was “halting its legislative efforts” and that its deputies would stop participating in sessions of the legislature or meetings of parliamentary commissions.

“I don’t care if they call me dictator or whatever else, it goes in one ear, out the other. What matters is what my people call me,” Erdogan said in a speech at an Istanbul university, where he was receiving an honorary doctorate. Erdogan and the government are furious at what they see as Western criticism of their fight against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group, which has waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy and whose allied groups in Syria enjoy U.S. support in the fight against Islamic State. Erdogan said the PKK, listed as a terrorist group by the EU and US, had killed almost 800 members of the security forces and more than 300 civilians since a ceasefire in the largely Kurdish southeast collapsed last year. [..] “Europe, as a whole, is abetting terrorism. Even though they declared the PKK a terrorist organisation, this is clear,” Erdogan said. “We see how the PKK can act so freely and comfortably in Europe.”

HDP co-leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag were jailed pending trial on Friday after refusing to give testimony in a probe linked to “terrorist propaganda”. Ten other HDP lawmakers were also detained, though some were later released. The US expressed deep concern, while Germany and Denmark summoned Turkish diplomats over the Kurdish arrests. European Parliament President Martin Schulz said the actions “call into question the basis for the sustainable relationship between the EU and Turkey”. “After discussions with our parliamentary group and our central executive board, we have decided to halt our legislative efforts in light of everything that has happened,” HDP spokesman Ayhan Bilgen said in a statement read out in front of the party’s offices in Diyarbakir and broadcast online. HDP officials would consult with the party’s supporters, many of whom are in the largely Kurdish southeast, and could then consider a full withdrawal from parliament, he said.

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“Climate change is intergenerational theft.”

Great Barrier Reef: What Have We Left For Our Children? (Naomi Klein)

There is no question that the strongest emotions I have about the climate crisis have to do with Toma and his peers. I have flashes of sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for them. But even more intense than this fear is the sadness about what they won’t ever know. These kids are growing up in a mass extinction, robbed of the cacophonous company of being surrounded by so many fast-disappearing life forms. According to a new WWF report, since I was born in 1970 the number of wild animals on the planet has dropped by more than half – and by 2020 it is expected to drop by two-thirds. What a lonely world we are creating for these kids. And what more powerful place to illustrate that absence than the Great Barrier Reef, on the knife-edge of survival?

So this film shows the reef through Toma’s eyes. He’s too young to understand concepts like coral bleaching and dying – it’s tough enough for him to understand that coral was ever alive in the first place. It also shows the Great Barrier Reef through the eyes of his mother: moved by the beauty that remains, heartbroken and infuriated by what has been lost. Because what has happened to this wondrous part of the world is not just a tragedy, it’s a crime. And the crime is still very much in progress, with our respective governments busily clearing the way for new coalmines and new oil pipelines.

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Aug 222016
 
 August 22, 2016  Posted by at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


NPC Wilkins-Rogers Milling Co., Washington, DC 1926

Oil Falls As August Price Rally Seen Overblown, China Fuel Exports Soar (R.)
Less Than 5% Of Japan Inc. Think Abe’s Stimulus Will Boost The Economy (R.)
Grim Outlook for the Economy, Stocks: Stephanie Pomboy (Barron’s)
Citi Is About to Relive the 2008 Derivatives Nightmare (MM)
The Brexit Question That Nobody Asked (BBG)
China Is Grappling With Hidden Unemployment (BBG)
Australia’s Unprecedented Collapse In Business Investment, In One Chart (BI)
Australia Central Bank Loses Credibility As Housing Boom Continues (AFR)
American Journalism Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes (Goodwin)
The Clintons Really Do Think They Can Get Away With Anything (WSJ)
Clinton Not In The Clear (Jack Kelly)
The History of Money: Not What You Think (Minskys)
German Government: Citizens Should Store Food, Water And Cash (DWN)
‘Nobody Believes In Anything Anymore’: Greek Crisis is Far From Over (CNBC)
Rescuing Refugees: ‘You Never Get Used To It – And That’s A Good Thing’ (G.)
Inuit Fear Being Overwhelmed As ‘Extinction Tourism’ Descends On Arctic (G.)

 

 

“China’s July exports of diesel and gasoline soared by 181.8% and 145.2% respectively..”

Oil Falls As August Price Rally Seen Overblown, China Fuel Exports Soar (R.)

Oil prices fell on Monday as analysts doubted upcoming producer talks would rein in oversupply, saying that Brent would likely fall back below $50 a barrel as August’s more than 20% crude rally looks overblown. Soaring exports of refined products from China also pressured prices, as this was seen as the latest indicator of an ongoing global fuel glut, traders said. China’s July exports of diesel and gasoline soared by 181.8% and 145.2% respectively compared with the same month last year, to 1.53 million tonnes and 970,000 tonnes each, putting pressure on refined product margins. Brent crude futures were trading at $50.22 per barrel at 0224 GMT, down 66 cents, or 1.3%.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude was down 51 cents, or 1.05%, at $48.01 a barrel. Analysts cast doubt on an August price rally, saying that much of it was a result of short-covering and anticipation of upcoming producer talks to discuss means to curb oversupply. “Positioning data seems to confirm our view that the latest oil bounce is more technical and positioning-oriented than fundamental. In fact, new buyers have been mostly absent the past few months,” Morgan Stanley said. Regarding the upcoming producer talks, the bank said a agreement was “highly unlikely” and that there were “too many headwinds and logistical challenges to a meaningful deal”.

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Less than 5% are wrong.

Less Than 5% Of Japan Inc. Think Abe’s Stimulus Will Boost The Economy (R.)

Japanese companies overwhelmingly say the government’s latest stimulus will do little to boost the economy and the Bank of Japan should not ease further, a Reuters poll showed, a setback for policymakers’ efforts to overcome deflation and stagnation. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this month unveiled a 13.5 trillion yen (£102.6 billion) fiscal package of public works projects and other measures, vowing a united front with the BOJ to revive the economy and raising speculation of a surge in government spending essentially financed by the central bank. But less than 5% of companies believe the steps will boost the economy near-term or raise its growth potential, according to the Reuters Corporate Survey, conducted August 1-16.

“It’s disappointing that the stimulus focuses on public works, and it lacks attention to promoting industry and technology that would lead to future growth,” said a manager at a precision-machinery maker. Abe took office 3 1/2 years ago, pledging to reboot the economy with aggressive monetary stimulus, fiscal spending and reform plans. After an early spurt of growth and surging corporate profits, helped by a sharp fall in the yen, the economy is again sputtering and prices are slipping, underscoring the challenge for Japan to beat nearly two decades of deflation and anaemic growth. “Unless drastic steps are taken to fix the root of Japan’s problems – the falling birthrate and working population – solid economic growth won’t return … only public debt would pile up without sustainable growth,” said an electrical machinery firm.

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You would still have to specify those who have nothing left to save; economists miss out on that.

Grim Outlook for the Economy, Stocks: Stephanie Pomboy (Barron’s)

For some time, Stephanie Pomboy, an economist and the founder of MacroMavens, has pushed a provocative theory that a crisis-chastened U.S. consumer would retard global growth. That is why a U.S. recovery has taken so long to take off, and why Japan and Europe look set to embark on more rounds of quantitative easing. An avid reader of Shakespeare, Pomboy appreciates the comic and tragic dimensions of the markets—the giddy optimism for the second half of the year, and the potentially disastrous consequences of excessively low rates. As stocks teetered at new highs, we phoned Pomboy in Vail, Colo., where she lives when not in Manhattan, to hear her latest views. They aren’t rosy: Investors and policy makers are deluding themselves that we will soon return to a pre-financial crisis framework. Things have changed, she says, which means expectations for economic growth in the second half are far too optimistic. And today’s low rates could cause another financial crisis, bankrupting pension plans, putting retirees at risk, and hurting stocks.

Barron’s: You like to focus on the consumer—and plot U.S. consumer spending as a percentage of GDP versus world trade. Why? Pomboy: What ignited and supported the entire era of globalization was the spendthrift U.S. consumer; economies have been totally reliant on trade to U.S. consumers. This once-in-a-generation asset deflation will fundamentally change behavior, just as the Depression changed an entire generation’s attitude about spending and saving. Obviously, the burden of proof is on me, because for 20 years the consumer has reliably borrowed from China to buy their tube socks. Post-crisis, the consumer has clearly pulled back.

How many months did we have disappointing retail sales numbers that no one could explain? They’d say it’s too hot, too cold, there’s Brexit. But what’s really causing this slowdown in spending is that the post-crisis consumer is determined to save, and do it the old-fashioned way. Historically, when rates go down, people save less. In this cycle, things have completely reversed. Over the same stretch of time that the two-year note has gone from 4% to 1%, the savings rate has doubled. There are mountains of evidence to support my thesis. But every Wall Street analyst and the Fed is using the pre-crisis analytical framework to look at an economy that is fundamentally challenged.

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Note the numbers: “Credit Suisse prudently sold $380 billion of derivatives to Citi, thereby reducing its own leverage exposure by $5 billion.”

Citi Is About to Relive the 2008 Derivatives Nightmare (MM)

Deutsche Bank – with its stock now trading at a 30-year low – was recently called the world’s riskiest financial institution by the IMF. Better late than never… In a last-ditch effort to save itself, DB is trying to dump a bucket load of credit derivatives – the murky, risky financial instruments that triggered the 2008 financial crisis. You would think no one would buy these weapons of financial mass destruction… but you’d be wrong. In a staggeringly stupid move, the American bank I’m telling you about today has gone on a derivatives shopping spree, eagerly taking credit default swaps off the hands of failing Eurozone banks like DB and Credit Suisse. That means, of course, another outsize short opportunity for you to take…

Citigroup already nearly destroyed itself with derivatives during the 2008 crisis, requiring the biggest taxpayer bailout in history in order to stay afloat. Strangely, it didn’t learn its lesson the first time its stock fell below $1. As rival banks see the writing on the wall and scramble to get rid of their derivatives, Citi is now cheerfully snapping up billions of dollars’ worth. Several weeks ago, Credit Suisse prudently sold $380 billion of derivatives to Citi, thereby reducing its own leverage exposure by $5 billion. Last year, Deutsche Bank palmed off $250 billion of credit default swaps on (guess who?) Citi, and is in talks to get rid of even more. The result is that Citi now holds the most derivatives of any of its U.S. rivals. That’s a staggering total exposure of nearly $56 trillion, according to the OCC’s latest report, shown here:

[..] our current $650 trillion derivatives market is a nightmare scenario waiting to happen. First problem: the size. It’s 36x the size of the U.S. GDP and over 8x larger than the world GDP – the entire global output of the entire world in a year. While credit default swaps shrank significantly in size since the financial crisis, they remain large enough to constitute a potential time bomb inside the financial system that could blow up any time. Second problem: the interconnectedness. Every derivative contract involves two parties that agree to make certain payments to each other. But if one party is unable or unwilling to live up to its agreement and make those payments, the other party is left holding the bag and nursing a big loss. In a crisis, this can leave a volume of broken contracts that will overwhelm these institutions and render them instantly insolvent.

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Where is the EU heading?

The Brexit Question That Nobody Asked (BBG)

Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, has written the best article I’ve read on Britain’s exit from the EU. In an essay for the New York Review of Books he makes many excellent points, but one is of surpassing importance. It’s an obvious point, or ought to be, that nonetheless has been almost entirely ignored by other respectable commentators: Whether Britain should stay in the EU depends on where the EU is heading. The EU is plainly in deep trouble with or without the U.K., and its condition as a political project is anything but stable. Judging whether Britain is better off as a member therefore requires a judgment not only about what Britain has gained or lost from membership up to now but also an assessment of the future character of the whole EU enterprise.

Britain’s Remain campaign, expressing the collective opinion of every expert on the subject, has had almost nothing to say about this. As King points out, the EU is structurally unsound. (Joseph Stiglitz in the FT makes the same point.) It has pressed political union both too far and not far enough. That is, it has created half a political union – with a single currency but without a collective fiscal policy or the political apparatus that would be necessary to legitimize it. King: Putting the cart before the horse – setting up a monetary union before a political union – has led the ECB to become more and more vocal about the need to “complete the architecture” of monetary union by proceeding quickly to create a Treasury and finance minister for the entire eurozone.

The ability of such a new ministry to make transfers between member countries of the monetary union would reduce pressure on the ECB to find new ways of holding the monetary union together. But there is no democratic mandate for a new ministry to create such transfers or to have political union – voters do not want either. And voters aren’t the only ones who don’t want it. German officialdom (backed by popular opinion) is viscerally opposed to a “transfer union,” which is Germany’s name for fiscal policy as it operates in any normal country. Germany’s position is understandable, since Germans would give much more than they received in any such arrangement. But that doesn’t alter the conclusion: Not only is the EU structurally unsound, but there’s also little prospect that the structure either can be or will be repaired.

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Color me baffled.

China Is Grappling With Hidden Unemployment (BBG)

Cracks are starting to show in China’s labor market as struggling industrial firms leave millions of workers in flux. While official jobless numbers haven’t budged, the underemployment rate has jumped to more than 5% from near zero in 2010, according to Bai Peiwei, an economics professor at Xiamen University. Bai estimates the rate may be 10% in industries with excess capacity, such as unprofitable steel mills and coal mines that have slashed pay, reduced shifts and required unpaid leave. Many state-owned firms battling overcapacity favor putting workers in a holding pattern to avoid mass layoffs that risk fueling social unrest. While that helps airbrush the appearance of duress, it also slows the shift of workers to services jobs, where labor demand remains more solid in China’s shifting economy.

“Underemployment in overcapacity industries is a drag on the potential improvement of productivity in China, which will lead to a softening wage trend,” said Grace Ng at JPMorgan in Hong Kong. “It would exert pressure on private consumption demand and in turn affect the overall rebalancing of the economy.” Other projections indicate the employment situation is even worse. An indicator of unemployment and underemployment produced by London-based research firm Fathom Consulting has more than tripled since 2012 to 13.2%. The official jobless rate isn’t much help for economists: it’s been virtually unchanged at about 4.1% since 2010 even as the economy slowed. The gauge only counts those who register for unemployment benefits in their home towns, which doesn’t take into account 277 million migrant workers. Total employment is 775 million, National Bureau of Statistics data show.

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Wow. What a chart that is.

Australia’s Unprecedented Collapse In Business Investment, In One Chart (BI)

You’ve probably heard of the “capex cliff”, the term for the collapse in capital expenditure plans by Australian businesses that is an inevitable feature of the economy following the once-in-a-lifetime mining investment boom driven mainly by the surge in Chinese demand over the past two decades. But with Australia’s manufacturing industry having been hollowed out too over the past decade, the capital investment pipeline for both mining and manufacturing are gone. So the fall-off, when measured in terms of a percentage of GDP, is nothing short of spectacular in historical context, as shown in this chart from Macquarie. It’s not hard to see why economists have occasionally mentioned the word “recessionary” in reference to the investment outlook.

Part of what’s driving this is that Australia’s economy is increasingly being driven by much less capital-intensive sectors such as education and tourism, which don’t require huge pieces of machinery and infrastructure like trains, tunnelling machines and factory plant equipment. And on the other side of the ledger, the huge increases in capital investment during the mining boom have laid the foundations for the vast increase in Australia’s commodity export volumes, which have been supporting economic growth since the spending started to fall away. The Macquarie research team notes, however, that “non-mining business capex has yet to meaningfully react to lower interest rates, and that companies are “waiting for clear signs of sustained demand before investing.” Right now, those signs are nowhere to be seen.

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You can make charts just like this one for many countries.

Australia Central Bank Loses Credibility As Housing Boom Continues (AFR)

Australia’s booming housing market has once again head-faked the central bank, which is losing credibility every time it cuts on claims the world’s dearest residential property prices are nothing to worry about. In rationalising its decision to reduce the cash rate to 1.5% in August, the Reserve Bank of Australia alleged that “the likelihood of lower interest rates exacerbating risks in the housing market has diminished”. Yet auction clearance rates in our two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, which account for 47% of the metro population, have subsequently risen back to boom-time levels. CoreLogic reports that 86.4% of Sydney auctions on the weekend resulted in a sale, which is 10 percentage points higher than the equivalent clearance rate 12 months ago and just shy of the 89.7% record set in May last year.

In Melbourne, 76.1% of auctions saw a sale, besting the 74.3% clearance rate in the same week last year. Median clearance rates in Sydney and Melbourne over the four weeks since July 31 have been 78% and 76% respectively, materially above the median levels observed in these cities since the current housing boom commenced in 2013 on the back of the RBA’s stimulus. While the RBA argues that much lower sales volumes in 2016 signal weakness, this is likely more a reflection of a four-year boom exhausting supply. And it does not stack up with unusually strong clearance rates or persistently exuberant capital gains across Sydney and Melbourne.

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I can only fully agree. And no, again, that’s not because I support Trump. Everything and everyone should be scrutinized.

American Journalism Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes (Goodwin)

Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it. The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand-in-hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations. The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America. The largest broadcast networks – CBS, NBC and ABC – and major newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.

Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang, suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison. By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion. Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake. The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young ones.

I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil-rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong. My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he leaned right to “keep the paper straight.” That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism. Those days are gone. The Times now is so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.

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But then you think: well, well, what got into the Wall Street Journal editors? Expect pressure on Clinton Foundation to increase.

The Clintons Really Do Think They Can Get Away With Anything (WSJ)

After years of claiming that the Clinton Foundation poses no ethical conflicts for Bill and Hillary or the U.S. government, Bill Clinton now admits the truth—sort of. If his wife becomes President, he says the Super PAC masquerading as a charity won’t accept foreign or corporate contributions. Bill will also resign from the foundation board, and Chelsea will stop raising money for it. Now they tell us. If such fund-raising poses a problem when she’s President, why didn’t it when she was Secretary of State or while she is running for President? The answer is that it did and does, and they know it, but the foundation was too important to their political futures to give it up until the dynastic couple were headed back to the Oval Office.

Now that Hillary is running ahead of Donald Trump, Bill can graciously accept new restrictions on their pay-to-play politics. Bill must be having a good laugh over this one. The foundation served for years as a conduit for corporate and foreign cash to burnish the Clinton image, pay for their travel expenses for speeches and foreign trips, and employ their coterie in between campaigns or government gigs. Donors could give as much as they wanted because the foundation is a “charity.” President Obama may have banished Sidney Blumenthal from the State Department, but Bill could stash his conspiratorial pal at the foundation, keeping him on the family payroll while Sid flooded Hillary with foreign-policy advice. Her private email server was supposed to hide their email traffic—until that gambit was exposed last year.

But FBI Director James Comey let Hillary off the hook on the emails, and he declined to investigate the foundation, so it looks like they’re home free. By now the corporate and foreign cash has already been delivered, in anticipation that Hillary Clinton could become the next President. So now it’s the better part of political prudence to claim the ethical high ground. If you choose to believe or have a short memory. Readers may recall that the foundation promised the White House when Mrs. Clinton became Secretary of State that the foundation would restrict foreign donations and get approval from the State Department. It turned out the foundation violated that pledge, specifically when accepting $500,000 from Algeria.

The foundation also agreed to disclose donor names but failed to do so for more than 1,000 foreign donors until the failure was exposed by press reports. [..] Far from offering some new clean ethical slate, this latest foundation gambit ought to be a warning about a third Clinton term. Protected by Democrats and a press corps desperate to beat Donald Trump, the Clintons really do think they can get away with anything.

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“.. In 2013, for instance, the Clinton Foundation took in $140 million, but spent just $9 million (6.4%) on direct aid. A typical charity devotes about 75% of receipts to aid.”

Clinton Not In The Clear (Jack Kelly)

Hillary Clinton has little to fear from Donald Trump. But she may be casting nervous glances over her shoulder at Preet Bharara. You may not have heard of Mr. Bharara. Sheldon Silver, former speaker of the New York State Assembly, a Democrat, and Dean Skelos, former majority leader of the New York Senate, a Republican, wish they hadn’t. In May, they were sentenced to 12 years and five years in prison, respectively, for corruption. Preet Bharara is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Since his appointment in 2009, Mr. Bharara “has launched a one-man crusade against evil-doers, ranging from corrupt politicians to the Mafia,” wrote Alan Chartock, a political science professor who’s a longtime watcher of New York state government.

The Southern District of New York is the lead of three U.S. attorneys’ offices investigating the Clinton Foundation, a recently retired deputy director of the FBI told the Daily Caller. The Clinton Foundation is headquartered in New York. It was begun in Little Rock, Ark., to raise funds for the Clinton library. The office in Washington, D.C., may focus on when Hillary was secretary of state. The Clinton Foundation has received more than $2 billion in contributions. More than 1,000 donors are foreigners. The foundation won’t disclose their names or amounts donated. Few of the funds raised have been spent on charitable works. In 2013, for instance, the Clinton Foundation took in $140 million, but spent just $9 million (6.4%) on direct aid. A typical charity devotes about 75% of receipts to aid.

Much more is spent on pay and benefits for staff, office rent, conferences and travel. Some of the highest-paid staffers are political operatives, such as Huma Abedin, who for a time was on the payrolls of both the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, and Sid Blumenthal, who ran a private intelligence network for Hillary in Libya. The most ballyhooed project, relief for Haiti after a devastating earthquake in 2010, was an example of “Robin Hood in reverse”— robbing the poor for the benefit of the rich, said financial analyst Charles Ortel. The Clinton Foundation is a “charity fraud network,” Mr. Ortel wrote on his blog. “What possesses powerful, wealthy and educated persons to prey on the most desperately poor humans on earth as they posture as philanthropists?”

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Interesting view.

The History of Money: Not What You Think (Minskys)

Most of us have an idea of how money came to be. It goes something like this: People wanted to exchange goods for other goods, but it was difficult to coordinate. So they started exchanging goods for money, and money for goods. This tells us that money is a medium of exchange. It’s a nice and simple story. The problem is that it may not be true. We may be understanding money entirely wrong. The above story assumes that first there was a market, and then people introduced money to make the market work better. But some people find this hard to believe. Those who subscribe to the Chartalist school of thought give a different history. Before money was used in markets, they say, it was used in primitive criminal justice systems.

Money started as—and still is—is a record of debt. It is a way to keep track of what one person owes another. There’s anthropological evidence to back up this view. Work by Innes, and Wray suggest that the origins of money are more like this: In a pre-market, feudal society, there was usually a system to maintain justice in the community. If someone committed a crime, the authority, let’s call him the king, would decide that the criminal owed a fine to the victim. The fine could be a cow, a sheep, three chickens, depending on the crime. Until that cow was brought forward, the criminal was indebted to the victim. The king would record the criminal’s outstanding debt. This system changed over time. Rather than paying fines to the victim, criminals were ordered to pay fines to the king.

This way, resources were being moved to the king, who could coordinate their use for the benefit of the community as a whole. This was useful for the King, and for the development of the society. But the amount of resources coming from a criminal here and there was not impressive. The system had to be expanded to draw more resources to the kingdom. To expand the system, the king created debt-records of his own. You can think of them as pieces of papers that say King-Owes-You. Next, he went to his citizens and demanded they give him the resources he wanted. If a citizen gave their cow to the king, the king would give the citizen some of his King-Owes-You papers. Now, a cow seems more useful than a piece of paper, so it seems silly that a citizen would agree to this.

But the king had thought of a solution. To make sure everyone would want his King-Owes-You papers, he created a use for them. He proclaimed that every so often, all citizens had to come forward to the kingdom. Each citizen would be in big trouble, unless they could provide little pieces of paper that showed the king still owed them. In that case, the king would let the citizen go, and not owe them any longer. The citizen would be free to go off and acquire more King-Owes-You papers, to make sure he would be safe the next time, too.

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Saw this on Reuters and other sites, but they all left out the need to store cash, for some reason, which is in the original directive. So I ran the article through Google Translate and corrected it a little.

A government advising people to store cash is not a minor point, I would think. Not in the days of plastic and a war on cash.

German Government: Citizens Should Store Food, Water And Cash (DWN)

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the federal government according to a report wants to encourage new stockpiling the population again, so that they, in the case of a disaster or an armed attack temporarily, can take care of themselves. “The population is ‘advised’ to hold a personal supply of food of ten days,” quoted the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” from a concept for civil defense, which the government is requested to adopt on Wednesday. According to the report, the population should be able to protect themselves in an emergency before calling government action to ensure an adequate supply of food, water, energy and cash. Therefore, the population should also be ‘advised’, to hold, for a period of five days, two liters of drinking water per person per day, it is stated in the text drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior.

According to “FAS” is the first strategy for civil defense since the end of the Cold War in 1989. She had been given in 2012 by the Budget Committee of the Bundestag in order. In the 69-page concept it is stated “that an attack on the territory of Germany, which requires a conventional defense, play” was. Nevertheless, it was necessary, “nevertheless to such sufficiently prepared not fundamentally excluded for the future development of life-threatening”. Interestingly, the FAZ reported in this regard that the Federal Government also worry about their own safety. The newspaper writes that in the paper literally stand “. Precautions are the event the task of the service office to meet in order to relocate the performance of duties of a public authority to another, sheltered place (Emergency Seat) can”

It is not clear whether these preparations related to a possible war. The federal government has recently changed its military strategy and regarded Russia as an enemy. NATO considers Russia an attack on NATO territory possible. Therefore, NATO wants the US and the EU also defend outside their own territory. Reuters writes that in the concept of “the need for a reliable alarm system, a better structural protection of buildings and sufficient capacity discussed in the health system” would. Reuters: “The civilian support of the armed forces should be again a priority. These included modifications to the traffic steering when the Bundeswehr must relocate combat units. “

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Very far from over. Please help me support. Read: Meanwhile in Greece..

‘Nobody Believes In Anything Anymore’: Greek Crisis is Far From Over (CNBC)

With Europe facing pressing crises including the refugee crisis, economic slowdown and political disintegration following the Brexit vote, it’s easy to forget that Greece’s political and economic crisis dominated headlines last summer. One year on and a third bailout worth €86 billion later, arrived at after tortuous negotiations between Greece and its lenders, and the situation in Greece is a game of two halves with many Greeks suffering – and some trying to make something out of a bad situation. Greece’s government has been forced to make widespread spending cuts over the course of its three separate bailout programs, making life harder for most Greeks of ordinary means. The cuts have affected all ages with unemployment rising to the highest level in Europe.

A survey by independent analysis firm DiaNEOsis in June revealed that many Greeks were facing an increasing struggle to get by. Extreme poverty in the Greek population (of 11 million people) had risen from 2.2% in 2009, to 15% in 2015, the public opinion survey of 1,300 people showed, with 1.6 million people now living below in extreme poverty. One resident of the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, Evangelos Kyrimlis, told CNBC that the Greece’s crisis had taken its toll on society, both at a local and national level. “Disillusionment is the first big thing that’s going on,” he noted. “Nobody believes in anything anymore.” “The second big thing is withdrawal. People have retreated to their families and fight only for the family survival. Society has been fragmented,” he said.

Kyrimlis works for his partner’s family firm, having returned to Greece after working for an engineering consultancy in London. Returning to Greece in the midst of the country’s financial breakdown, he said he now noted an increase in animosity between people, saying there was a “widespread hatred not directed to anyone in particular, it’s like all against all.”

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“When they reached the port in Sicily the Italian Red Cross were there, with coffins and flowers for every person who died [..] The tough MSF doctors who have been going from war to war cried because of the flowers..”

Rescuing Refugees: ‘You Never Get Used To It – And That’s A Good Thing’ (G.)

It was the silence of the passengers that Hassiba Hadj-Sahraoui first noticed. Usually when the humanitarian rescue boat sees a tiny dinghy bobbing about in the Mediterranean there’s frantic waving and shouting. “When our team approached in smaller boats and everyone was so quiet we realised something was wrong,” she says. “We asked permission to go aboard and that’s when we realised the others had been waiting for rescue for hours with dead bodies in the boat.” Twenty-two bodies were recovered that day (21 of them women) and 209 people were saved by the crew of the Aquarius, a boat run by Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) that patrols the refugee route between Libya and Italy. MSF advocacy manager Hadj-Sahraoui got an idea of how they died from the testimonies of survivors once they were safely on the Aquarius.

A wooden board that had been placed along the bottom of the dinghy broke and water started to come in, mixing with leaking fuel cans. A panic ensued and the 22 people died either in a stampede or drowning in a mix of water and fuel. The people they rescued were in shock. “The priority – it’s sad to say – is with the living,” says Hadj-Sahraoui. “So there’s a very quick medical team, trying to assess needs.” Once the survivors were on the Aquarius they were each given a blanket, water and some food. The people who were soaked in fuel were sent for a shower, because the fuel and sea salt cause nasty burns. Then they registered them. Hadj-Sahraoui speaks Arabic, French and English, a great advantage in her line of work. She asks each person where they are from, how old they are, and if they are travelling alone.

“We don’t wear sunglasses, because we need to have eye contact. It’s about humanity. It’s big smiles saying: ‘You’re now safe. This is where you are. This is what’s going to happen next.’ What surprised me is how polite people are. How they take their time to say thank you.” Once all the survivors were safely on board, and being tended to, the crew of the Aquarius also felt it was right on this occasion to recover the bodies of the women and one man who died. “For several hours we tried to keep the living on one side of the boat. The bodies had spent hours in the water, so we were trying to protect the living from seeing that. The doctor took pictures for identification, because families will never know what happened to their loved ones.” When they reached the port in Sicily the Italian Red Cross were there, with coffins and flowers for every person who died.

“The tough MSF doctors who have been going from war to war cried because of the flowers,” says Hadj-Sahraoui. “I was one of the suckers who cried a lot.” She says that people who do humanitarian work need to learn to take care of themselves, because there’s a lot of emotional burnout. MSF staff have psychological debriefings before and after they go on missions, and after extreme experiences like this one.

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No-one’s going to stop this.

Inuit Fear Being Overwhelmed As ‘Extinction Tourism’ Descends On Arctic (G.)

In a few days, one of the world’s largest cruise ships, the Crystal Serenity, will visit the tiny Inuit village of Ulukhaktok in northern Canada. Hundreds of passengers will be ferried to the little community, more than doubling its population of around 400. The Serenity will then raise anchor and head through the Northwest Passage to visit several more Inuit settlements before sailing to Greenland and finally New York. It will be a massive undertaking, representing an almost tenfold increase in passenger numbers taken through the Arctic on a single vessel – and it has triggered considerable controversy among Arctic experts. Inuit leaders fear that visits by giant cruise ships could overwhelm fragile communities, while others warn that the Arctic ecosystem, already suffering the effects of global warming, could be seriously damaged.

“This is extinction tourism,” said international law expert Professor Michael Byers, of the University of British Columbia. “Making this trip has only become possible because carbon emissions have so warmed the atmosphere that Arctic sea ice in summer is disappearing. The terrible irony is that this ship – which even has a helicopter for sightseeing and a huge staff-to-passenger ratio – has an enormous carbon footprint that is only going to make things even worse in the Arctic.” The Serenity is by far the biggest cruise vessel to traverse the fabled Northwest Passage, whose exploration has claimed the lives of hundreds of seamen. The ship has a crew of 655 and carries 1,070 passengers, who have paid between £19,000 and £120,000 for a voyage that Crystal Cruises says will take them on an “intrepid adventure” from Anchorage in Alaska to New York over 32 days.

For its part, Crystal insists its clients will have to follow a strict code of conduct during shore visits, while the ship’s air, water and rubbish discharges will be tightly controlled. Only low-sulphur fuel will be burned in the Serenity’s engines, said a spokesman. The Serenity will be accompanied by the UK icebreaker the RSS Ernest Shackleton, he added.

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